Sparksheet » Dan Levyhttp://sparksheet.com
Good ideas about content, media and marketingWed, 29 Jul 2015 15:06:31 +0000en-UShourly1Building a Digital Legacy: Q&A with The Atlantic’s Kimberly Lauhttp://sparksheet.com/building-a-digital-legacy-qa-with-the-atlantics-kimberly-lau/
http://sparksheet.com/building-a-digital-legacy-qa-with-the-atlantics-kimberly-lau/#commentsMon, 20 Jan 2014 17:07:46 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18910The Atlantic has been around for 155 years, but with an expansive digital strategy, it’s not showing its age. We spoke with Kimberly Lau, the brand’s digital VP, about what it means to be a legacy brand online.

]]>The Atlantic has been around for 155 years, and for most of that time it’s been a print publication. Do you still define The Atlantic as a magazine?

I don’t. The magazine is obviously a very important medium and is part of our history, but everything we’re doing in digital is about expanding the brand. It’s really about The Atlantic across multiple mediums as a sensibility. The Atlantic stands for quality content and we’re finding new ways to do that every day.

The Atlantic has been seen as a leader when it comes to legacy media brands adapting to digital. What do you think you’ve understood and done right that others haven’t?

Lots of things! One of them is actually being small and nimble and having a very collaborative approach. Being a smaller company, the stakes have been high, and that pressure has actually been good for the brand.

The Atlantic has invested in editorial and product to drive digital growth. You see a lot of magazine brands that just try to take their offline content and put it online and put relatively little effort into the editorial on their websites.

The Atlantic has invested in editorial and product to drive digital growth. Tweet

This is a brand that today has more paid journalists than ever. Part of that is because of our digital operations and growth. Part of it is being able to try new things and being willing to occasionally fail, and part of it is the investments that have been made to support it.

The Atlantic has been a leader in the shift toward “native advertising.” You’ve also become a cautionary tale in the wake of the Scientology snafu. What did you take away from that experience, and did it dampen your enthusiasm for native advertising at all?

Going through it helped clarify things on multiple levels. First, it was a reminder that a brand like The Atlantic has a history and legacy, which means it’s held to different standards.

When I look at competitors, I don’t necessarily look at magazines. In the digital realm, the sites that we look at occasionally with interest or envy are sites like Buzzfeed or Upworthy, and not because they are directly competing against us, but because they are innovating and winning in that space.

We were a very early player in the native advertising space. It was easy to look at what our competitors were doing and say, “Okay, this is how Buzzfeed’s doing it,” and to be blind a little bit and think those standards could be exactly the same for us.

The truth of the matter is, it’s not the same. We had spent a ton of time, prior to Scientology, talking about and revising our standards and trying to develop the right approach, as we were moving very quickly.

For me the blind spot was thinking that as long as everything was labeled appropriately, we were okay. But at the end of the day, that missed the key point, which is that it needs to be appropriate for our target audience.

In January 2013, the magazine received criticism for its editorially uncharacteristic sponsored post about Scientology.

Access to your iOS apps is included with a print subscription. Are they simply serving the same audience on different devices, or pulling in a different kind of reader?

They are serving separate segments of the audience, ultimately. I hate the word “mobile” because it encompasses so much. For me the native iOS apps are really about separate paid revenue streams, with the two primary ones being The Atlantic magazine application and then our more recent Atlantic Weekly iOS application.

Both of those are really focused on being the service for people who want to subscribe to a regular digital product.

We, like everybody else, got into developing native apps back during the launch of the iPad. Today, it’s an important product, it’s a profitable product, but ultimately it’s not going to be the saviour of our industry, either.

And that’s part of us being here – the future of our world is having to develop multiple products. We have to be looking at much smaller customer segments and we have to find ways of serving and monetizing those diverse segments.

It’s not just about advertising, it’s not just about a paid strategy, it’s about multiple different strategies layering up and creating a more robust business model.

The Atlantic Weekly is a free app that offers a curated selection of the publication’s top stories each week.

Tell us about TheWire, which curates content and social conversations from around the web. Lots of web-native sites, like Gawker and The Daily Beast, already occupy this space. Why is it important to curate as well as create content?

The news cycle and the way journalism is followed has changed significantly with the web. It used to be that the only sources for news were a few distinguished outlets and they basically determined what was on the agenda.

The Wire is really aimed at trying to break through the noise. If Twitter is a primary source for you, the cycles are very fast, there’s a lot out there and it’s hard to keep up. Part of The Wire’s approach is about keeping tabs on all those sources and being the go-to site to find out what is going on at any given moment.

Generally I think most news outlets are moving towards having elements of this kind of approach.

The Wire competes with other online daily news sites like Gawker and The Daily Beast.

What would you say is the biggest advantage of being a legacy publisher when it comes to being successful in the digital space? What’s the biggest drawback?

The biggest advantage is having name recognition. Although it’s interesting – since I’ve been here, I’ve constantly had people say to me, “You know, I never really knew The Atlantic very well, but in the last couple of years they’ve been putting out consistently great stories.”

To be fair I wasn’t a huge follower of The Atlantic five years ago, either. I don’t think what’s changed is our content. What’s changed is the web. Social platforms have made it a lot easier for our content to get more exposure. And in fact, The Atlantic has an audience that is significantly larger than it ever has been at any other time in its history, which for a legacy magazine brand, where many of them have had falling circulation, is not typically the case.

What holds us back? Being a startup and having the ability to have certain metrics that you can operate towards that aren’t necessarily about being profitable is a freedom. It’s a short-term freedom, but it’s a freedom.

]]>Contently’s mission is to help brands and journalists connect to tell great stories. Can you walk us through what this matchmaking service looks like?

We got into this business because we saw what was happening to the talented, working journalists who were being laid off at newspapers and magazines and not having anywhere to go but freelancing.

Another founding ethos was that we didn’t believe you had to have some sort of legacy to be respected as a credible publisher, nor did you have to have some special status as a company – good content and good stories should supersede other considerations.

Good content and good stories should supersede other considerations.Tweet

We essentially have one product with two components to it. The first is our freelancer network, which provides services such as the ability to build a website, to rank for your name on Google and get credit for your work.

The second is for publishers. We have a search tool and an account management team that helps the brand or agency staff up with a go-to pool of freelance talent.

Using the data we have on our network, you can look for writers who (for example) write about horses and live in Nebraska or who write about NASA and live in Sweden or who have Klout scores over 50.

Your publisher list includes a mix of brands like AMEX and Tide as well as media outlets like Gawker and Slate. How do you approach those two types of clients differently?

We try to model our workflow and our software after best practices for magazines, so the software we end up building actually works very well for traditional media companies in addition to brands.

Gawker, for example, are building out sponsored content offerings for their advertisers. A Gawker advertiser might want to sponsor a series of posts and our software makes it very efficient for Gawker to use their own freelancers or our freelancers.

And some media companies just use us for their own editorial workflow, for their internal staff with or without freelancers, which is pretty cool to see.

Is it more of a challenge to create native advertising that has to mimic a publication’s existing voice?

It is, but it shouldn’t be. A brand ought to develop an editorial voice that, if you strip away all of the branding, you still know who it is. A lot of brands are very new to this game. They’re hiring new people. They ought to have an editorial director who is really being the champion of that.

For example, we do a lot of work with Forbes. If Forbes is looking for someone to do some business writing for one of their clients, there are tons of former Forbes freelancers in our network, so it becomes really easy. You get this bar of brand equity.

Contently’s service for freelancers gives brands and media publications access to their bio, portfolio of work and social reach.

I recently spoke with the CEO of NewsCred who is doing something similar to Contently. But they are starting to build up an in-house editorial team in addition to their syndication service. What do you make of that approach?

That’s interesting. In the beginning we did half of the editorial internally. It’s just tough when you’re trying to be a technology company but you’re on the hook for services like that on an ongoing basis.

You end up having to think like an agency and a tech company and it’s very hard to do both. I’ll be curious to see how they do. Maybe they’ll be incredibly successful at it, but it will be a lot of work.

Contently is not a media company and we’re not an agency either. We’re trying to be the plumbing and the arms dealer, so to speak, rather than doing the content for anyone.

We would rather not compete with the agencies that might want to take on that strategic or editorial role.

The Content Strategist started as a way for us to show what our potential clients could do with Contently. We said, “Let’s build a publication, we’ll use freelancers from our network, we’ll use our tools and we’ll show people that you can have a growing publication with lots of readers.”

As our customers have gotten more sophisticated with their content, so have we. Now we use it to fill the top of the Contently funnel for people who may be interested in becoming clients.

Certainly there are a huge number of readers that subscribe, visit and share who have no intention or need to become our customers, but there is a certain subset that do, and we basically establish a relationship with them.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/the-content-marketing-matchmaker-qa-with-contentlys-shane-snow/feed/3Data Stories: Q&A with Bitly Scientist Emeritus Hilary Masonhttp://sparksheet.com/data-stories-qa-with-bitly-scientist-emeritus-hilary-mason/
http://sparksheet.com/data-stories-qa-with-bitly-scientist-emeritus-hilary-mason/#commentsThu, 14 Nov 2013 13:38:56 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18574Some see science as the flipside of creativity. Not Hilary Mason. We spoke to the data scientist, who recently moved from bitly to venture firm Accel, about using data to tell unexpected stories.

]]>For a lot of us, when we think data science we think pocket protectors and lab coats. But you think data science is a creative endeavour. How so?

We have this cultural assumption that scientists are not creative and that is absolutely untrue. There’s a ton of creativity in the process of doing good science and in working with data.

Generally there is some problem to solve and there’s a ton of creativity in how you construct your analysis to address that problem.

A lot of what a data scientist does is communication. We take some fairly complicated answers and simplify them, and we tell someone who is not involved in the analysis what the conclusions are and how to understand them. That’s where the storytelling comes in.

Do you think there’s an opportunity for scientists to partner with journalists or marketers to tell great stories?

Some of the best collaborations I’ve seen have been a pair of people, one of whom comes from a mathematics background and one of whom comes from a creative background.

The team that wrote the popular OK Cupid data blog, for example, was a comedian and a data scientist.

One project I’m in love with right now is a project done around tracking cicadas. They built a series of hardware sensors, they made an open source kit so anyone can build their own sensors, and they’re collecting the largely community-generated sensor data from around New York City.

They have this cool interactive map where you can see where the projections of the cicadas are coming from based on the temperature and soil.

I love this project because it blends so many different things – it’s great data journalism, it’s a community data gathering and it’s open source hardware.

It’s almost like Revenge of the Nerds, where data collection is all of a sudden a sexy profession. At the same time, big data has become a buzzword. Is this a good thing?

There is certainly a lot of hype around the notion of big data. Generally my attitude is, you should ignore the hype and find the real value. There is plenty of real value to demonstrate but it’s not as easy as a lot of the hype has led us to believe.

I don’t think we have the right word yet for the conversation, but it’s not what we would traditionally call privacy. It’s really about the friction in how far my data can spread and how to control it.

When we talk about privacy we use words like violation. That’s not the case here. We are voluntarily sharing data, we just don’t necessarily see the consequences of that. I think we need to come up with a different label for this particular discussion.

You work as a data scientist in the private sector. Do you see more interesting research coming out of branded environments rather than universities?

I see interesting research coming from both independently and in collaborations between the two. On the academic side of research it’s actually kind of unfortunate because it’s very hard for people in academic positions to get access to the data that they have the knowledge and skills to do good work around.

If you’re a startup you have data but you’re usually so busy you don’t really have the luxury of doing proper research.

bitly tries to give data to as many academic projects as possible. There are public data sets for people and if someone comes to bitly with a specific project, bitly will put together a data set and ask the academic institution to sign an agreement that lets them publish whatever they like off the data as long as they can’t profit from it.

Some really great research has come out of it. One example is a report called “Blogs and Bullets” from a group at George Washington University and the U.S. Institute of Peace that studied the effect of social media use during the Arab Spring. This was a topic bitly was fascinated by but did not have the domain knowledge to address.

Where does bitly get its data and how has bitly used that data internally?

bitly gets its data from all the bitly links shared and all the clicks on those links. The people at bitly look at what the click distributions look like geographically, by social network and by device. Then the content at the other end of those links is analyzed.

bitly is always finding unexpected things. The brand can see a really big distinction between what people will share publicly versus what they’re actually reading.

What people share publicly is a highly curated subset of the content they consume. It’s all stuff designed to make their identity look great, to make their lives look good and to make them look intellectual, whereas they will read celebrity gossip and sports scores. Seeing that so clearly in the data was actually a big surprise to me.

It shows that you have to choose what side to optimize for – consumption or sharing.

A chart created with data from the data site OK Cupid. Image via blog.okcupid.com.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/data-stories-qa-with-bitly-scientist-emeritus-hilary-mason/feed/2Spirit of Greece: In the Face of Economic Crisis, a National Brand Aims for the Sunhttp://sparksheet.com/spirit-of-greece-in-the-face-of-economic-crisis-a-national-brand-aims-for-the-sun/
http://sparksheet.com/spirit-of-greece-in-the-face-of-economic-crisis-a-national-brand-aims-for-the-sun/#commentsMon, 04 Nov 2013 20:31:44 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18789Former Sparksheet editor Dan Levy travels to the edge of Europe to discover how Metaxa, a 125-year-old spirit brand, is reinventing itself as Greece’s great amber hope.

]]>On a cool late summer evening in September I step into a cable car in downtown Athens and head toward the sun. In this case “the sun” is a bright yellow swirl painted at the top of the tunnel leading to Lycabattus Hill, Athens’ highest peak and the site of one of the city’s poshest restaurants.

The cable car is part of a branded experience called Metaxa Rise, which uses lighting effects, video collage and public transportation to tell the story of one of modern Greece’s oldest brands. The installation is also meant to serve as a beacon of light during the country’s protracted economic crisis, according to its creators.

“This project is a great display of optimism and hope,” says Panos Sarantopoulos, CEO of Metaxa, the company that produces 10 million bottles per year of the amber spirit of the same name.

While an ostentatious marketing campaign for a premium spirit may seem out of step with the country’s moment of austerity, Sarantopoulos knows something about staging a comeback. Less than three years ago the now 46-year-old CEO took on a challenge that essentially amounted to a dare: revitalizing a staid Greek brand while Greece itself was steeped in recession. The question Sarantopolous was forced to grapple with is the same one I encounter during a three-day trip to the Mediterranean nation: How much control does any company have over its so-called “brand”?

The sun awaits at the top of tunnel of the Metaxa Rise (left). The cable car (right) brings people to the top of Lycabattus Hill in Athens. Image by Io Paschou, courtesy of Metaxa.

The rogue spirit

Founder Spyros Metaxa. Image courtesy of Metaxa.

Metaxa is marketed as “the smoothest amber spirit under the sun,” but the brand’s history has seen its bumps. The company was founded in 1888 by Spyros Metaxa, an aristocratic merchant who combined aged wine distillates with muscat wine, rose petals and other secret herbal ingredients, to create a sweet, floral liqueur.

Metaxa’s elixir was sold as cognac until 1937, when French producers secured the label as a controlled appellation of origin. For the next five decades Metaxa was classified on cocktail menus and Duty Free shelves as a brandy. Then, in 1989, the definition of brandy was changed to exclude spirits that contained anything other than wine distillates; no fresh wine or botanicals allowed. Metaxa’s executives at the time were forced to go rogue, a turn of events that has become part of the brand’s carefully crafted story.

“It’s so much easier to belong to a group,” says Sarantopoulos. “But they decided to blaze their own trail.” During a tour of Metaxa’s headquarters in suburban Athens, Sarantopoulos stops to point out two photos hanging on a wall, one of Anthony Quinn as Aristotle Onassis in The Greek Tycoon and another of Jack Palance as Fidel Castro in Che! Both men are pictured drinking Metaxa. “These people come from completely different social classes,” says Sarantopoulos, referring to the characters, not the actors. “But what do they have in common? These are men who know what they want.”

The same year Metaxa was stripped of its brandy status it was sold to the British alcohol conglomerate Grand Metropolitan (now Diageo) and eventually landed in the hands of Rémy Cointreau. By the time the global financial crisis hit Greece, Metaxa appeared to have lost its shine, seen by most Greeks as the sort of stodgy brandy that grandmothers would cook with or that mourners would serve after a funeral.

“Metaxa is a brand that has suffered a lot,” says Constantine Stergides, an Athens-based wine writer who organizes wine shows throughout the country. “I believe that up to now it was a peripheral brand for huge drinks companies. It’s a powerful brand, but it lost its strategy somewhere along the way.”

The Metaxa family of spirits. Image courtesy of Metaxa.

Rebranding in the time of crisis

CEO Panos Sarantopoulos. Image courtesy of Metaxa.

In 2011, Sarantopoulos was brought in to right the ship. A veteran of the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Krug champagne houses, the CEO was given the unenviable task of reviving a Greek heritage brand while the country was making global headlines; throughout the summer, demonstrators filled Athens’ Syntagma square to protest the tax increases and austerity measures the government enacted in response to the debt crisis.

Meanwhile, the alcohol industry was hit with a 10 percent increase in the Value Added Tax, along with a special consumption tax, which grew 125 percent between 2009 and 2012. A bottle of Metaxa 5-Star (the company’s base product) that retailed for €11 in 2010 cost more than €15 a year later. According to the Greek Reporter, the taxes, which combined accounted for 57 percent of the retail price of spirits in 2012, resulted in a decline of alcohol consumption from roughly 284 million gallons in the first half of 2009 to 148 million gallons in the first half of 2012.

“I don’t think anybody considered consumption would decrease so much,” says Huity Konstantinidou, Metaxa’s senior international brand manager. “The state basically destroyed the industry.” On my first night in Greece, Konstantinidou brings us to a restaurant in Glyfada, a beachside suburb 20 minutes south of Athens. The restaurant is called Tsi Tsi and exemplifies a new wave of eateries that serve Greek comfort food in hip settings at affordable prices. Lanterns made out of woven baskets hang from a high wooden ceiling. Hand-cut fries and heaping souvlaki pitas are served in giant metal grain scoops. One online reviewer calls it “the first souvlaki place with valet parking.” Elis Kiss, a local journalist, ironically refers to these booming post-recession businesses as “souvlakeries” (pronounced with a French accent; apparently some line their pitas with Béarnaise sauce instead of tzatziki). “A few years ago it was all sushi,” says Konstantinidou. “Greeks love going out – now they just do it less, and spend less.”

After dinner we walk over to a bar called Pere Ubu where the patrons are all young, attractive and seemingly recession-proof. Konstantinidou orders a round of cocktails – Metaxa 5-Star mixed with various combinations of passionfruit, coriander, lime, ginger, cucumber and marmalade – served in Mason jars. It’s exactly the sort of scene the brand is trying to cultivate in trendy bars from Seattle to Sofia to Shanghai.

“Greece is our passport”

Spirits are unique in the branding world. No other consumer product is tied so closely to its place of origin (with the possible exception of food, which doesn’t travel as well). When you think tequila, you think Mexico. When you think vodka, you think Russia. Most people know ouzo as Greece’s national libation, but Metaxa has long been the go-to Greek spirit for Duty Free shoppers seeking to bring home a piece of the country; Metaxa is all over the Athens airport, starting with the luggage carts outside the terminal.

Still, Metaxa seems to have an ambivalent relationship with its national provenance. Although the company’s slogan is “The Original Greek Spirit” and its logo features a Salamina warrior ready to take on the ancient Persians, Metaxa’s CEO plays down the association between Brand Metaxa and Brand Greece. “Greece is our passport, it’s not our DNA,” Sarantopoulos says.

Sarantopoulos, who started his career in sales at Hennessy cognac, is fluent in marketing-speak. He peppers his conversation with canned phrases like “smooth living,” “unique aromatic intensity” and “celebrating the joy and optimism of the sun.” But he gets cagey when you drop the word “brand,” insisting on referring to Metaxa as a “house.” In response to my question about “Brand Greece,” he asks, “How is it conceivable to reduce the past, present and future, the country, its people and their lives into the term ‘brand’?”

Although we’re in the age of “nation branding,” “personal branding” and even “scent branding,” something about the word “brand” seems to make some people uncomfortable, even (and perhaps especially) marketing people; imagine a sex educator who refuses to use the word “sex,” or a pastor who blanches every time you talk about god. Maybe it’s a Greek thing. Stergides, the wine writer, says that Greece has always lagged behind its Mediterranean counterparts when it comes to promoting its brand internationally. “Greece as a country doesn’t have a clear image of itself,” he says. “The clichés are not as clear-cut as Italy or France or Spain and have not been exploited” by the government or industry. (He references a talk by South African advertising executive Peter Economides who calls Greece “one of the greatest brands that’s never been branded.”) But Stergides says there seems to be a “solidarity movement” of consumers, especially members of the Greek diaspora, buying Greek products to help the country through its crisis. “There are a lot of hellenophiles out there,” he says.

On the other hand, there are also those – particularly in Europe – who resent Greece’s role in the continent’s ongoing hardships. “Some people say, ‘We’ve done enough for Greece,’” Sarantopoulos tells me on the tour. “Then I pour them a glass and another and soon they’re buying a bottle. If they like it, they don’t care where it’s from.”

Metaxa’s urban beach in Berlin. Image courtesy of Metaxa.

Capturing the sun

When Sarantopoulos took the reins of Metaxa in 2011 he zeroed in on two elements that set the spirit apart: its compelling story and its distinctive taste. Metaxa’s story revolves around the sun, which is represented in the product’s yellow-gold packaging as well as a series of branded experiences Sarantopoulos and Konstantinidou have launched in the past few years. In addition to Metaxa Rise on Lycabattus Hill – the sun at the apex of the cable car lift symbolizes Metaxa’s mission to “capture the sun” – there’s Metaxa Bay, an urban beach in Berlin speckled with bright yellow lounge chairs as well as similar pop-up experiences around the world.

At the heart of Metaxa lore is Samos, a lush Aegean island less than two kilometres from the coast of Turkey, whose ample sunlight nourishes the grapes that lend the spirit its body. That’s where I’m flown on my second day in Greece for a 24-hour agronomy lesson – and first-hand look at the brand’s prettiest and most powerful marketing platform. Here’s what I learn: Muscat grapes are cultivated on the slopes of Mount Ambelos, buttressed by hand-built stone terraces known as pezulas that prevent Samos’ rocky soil from washing away. The grapes grow from sea level up to more than 800 metres; the higher the altitude – and closer to the sun – the sweeter the grape.

Samos’ vineyards are almost all family-owned and relatively tiny (any property more than a hectare is considered large). The steepness of the terroir makes irrigation and mechanization extremely difficult, and both are restricted by the grower’s cooperative that regulates the production and sale of all Samos wine. Considering the global craze over organic, fair trade and artisanal agriculture (the list of buzzwords goes on), it’s easy to see why Sarantopoulos seized on Samos, whose vineyards he calls “hidden treasures,” as Metaxa’s ultimate brand asset.

The vineyards of Samos. Image courtesy of Metaxa.

Meeting the Metaxa Master

Metaxa Master Costas Raptis. Image by Metaxa.

If Samos is the heart of the Metaxa story, the brand’s cellars in Kifisia, a quiet suburb 20 minutes north of Athens, are its brain. That’s where Costas Raptis, the current guardian of Spyros Metaxa’s secret recipe, plies his craft.

Raptis is the fifth Metaxa Master in history, a title he’s held for 27 years. He meets us in the bowels of the distillery wearing a sleek dark suit and resembling a more refined, silver-haired version of the actor Billy Bob Thornton. A former chemist, Raptis is a combination of master blender, cellar master, oenologist and perfume maker, a one-of-a-kind skill set that Metaxa’s ingredient list of oak-aged distillates, muscat wine, rose petals and other locally sourced botanicals requires of him.

Flanked by Sarantopoulos and Konstantinidou, Raptis walks us through several rooms stacked with French limousine oak casks, the vessel of choice for aging brandy. He pauses at an 80-year-old barrel that’s named after Metaxa’s eponymous founder, who died in 1909. A special blend drawn from the cask was released in 2008 to celebrate the brand’s 120th anniversary. At the end of the tour, we’re treated to a small glass of the blend, which is sold as Metaxa Aen, meaning “forever.” It tastes rich and earthy, like ancient figs or Manuka honey, as a wine writer in the room points out. Sarantopoulos says its warmth and aroma remind him of stepping into a Greek Orthodox church. Raptis says he’d prefer to let the spirit speak for itself.

After the tour, we’re told to brace ourselves for one last “surprise,” which turns out to be the Metaxa Rise cable car experience, followed by dinner at Orizontes, a pricey restaurant atop Lycabattus Hill. The view from our outdoor table is stunning – a panorama of Athens, with the original Olympic Stadium, the parliament building and the Acropolis in clear sight. The meal begins with a round of Metaxa “sun tonics,” a clever brand invention whereby the spirit is served in a lit-up, translucent orb that rests on the rim of an ice-filled glass, glowing like – what else? – the sun.

Before pouring the amber liquid into my glass, I look down at the Parthenon lit up below us. It’s a reassuring sight, a reminder that, as bad as things may get, in the grand sweep of time we’re all just shooting stars.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/spirit-of-greece-in-the-face-of-economic-crisis-a-national-brand-aims-for-the-sun/feed/2Moving On: Five Lessons From Four and a Half Years of Editing Sparksheethttp://sparksheet.com/moving-on-five-lessons-from-four-and-a-half-years-of-editing-sparksheet/
http://sparksheet.com/moving-on-five-lessons-from-four-and-a-half-years-of-editing-sparksheet/#commentsMon, 28 Oct 2013 14:19:48 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18793This is my last post as editor of Sparksheet. With four and a half years, 561 posts, 31 industry awards (we’re up for 7 more next month!) and 129 contributor relationships under my belt, I’m moving on to join the startup world. From the very beginning the folks at Spafax understood that the only way […]

]]>This is my last post as editor of Sparksheet. With four and a half years, 561 posts, 31 industry awards (we’re up for 7 more next month!) and 129 contributor relationships under my belt, I’m moving on to join the startup world.

From the very beginning the folks at Spafax understood that the only way Sparksheet would work as an incubator/showcase of the agency’s creativity, innovation and thought leadership was for it to stand on its own as an independent media brand. I’ll always be grateful to them for entrusting me with the resources and autonomy to build Sparksheet from an upstart marketing blog into a truly global multiplatform magazine.

I always came back from these adventures filled with insights and lessons from media and marketing professionals I’ve met along the way, and so I thought I’d sign off by sharing five key lessons I’ve learned from editing Sparksheet for the better part of five years.

Celebrating Sparksheet’s first anniversary.

Quality and credibility go hand in hand

When we launched Sparksheet in June 2009, we had a few obstacles to surmount. First, there was no budget for contributors. Second, no one had heard of us (and we didn’t have much content to stand on). And third, we feared that most would dismiss us as yet another corporate blog masquerading as media.

In the very beginning I had to call in some favours, hassling my colleagues and roping in a few thought leader friends for contributions. But pretty soon, I had people telling me they’d be honoured to write for Sparksheet, and I eventually found myself in a position where I was turning away more people than I was approaching.

It’s simply not true that if you build it, they will come. But if you build a platform based on the highest editorial and design standards you will establish your credibility very quickly. People recognize quality, and they want to be a part of it.

I always approached Sparksheet as the independent, award-winning editorial publication it became. That meant maintaining an editorial calendar, setting deadlines (and holding people to them) and engaging with every think piece as if it were my own.

Turns out that if you treat people, their work and their time with respect, they will not only respect you, they will go to bat for you. That’s not just a recipe for good content; it’s the basis of good marketing.

The 2009 iteration of the Sparksheet homepage.

Relationships are everything

Sparksheet has always been about people. Our very first post, written by my coastal colleague Al St. Germain, was all about navigating the client-agency relationship.

As editor, I’ve always relied on personal relationships to power Sparksheet with content and conversations. Some of these relationships were forged over Twitter or email, some at conferences or in meetings with colleagues around the world.

But in each case, friendliness led to friendship, which led to collaboration, great content and, eventually, the sort of influence and advocacy that brands dream about.

At APEX Expo 2013, we turned people, like Spafax’s own Al St. Germain, into content.

Don’t be afraid to fail

“Fail fast” has become a mantra in the startup world but you don’t hear it enough in media circles, where successes are trumpeted and setbacks are quickly buried.

Some things we just didn’t have the resources or energy to sustain, others just flat out didn’t work. Maybe some will take off after I’m gone.

Innovation is Sparksheet’s raison d’etre. If we weren’t constantly evolving and experimenting with new platforms, channels and content we might as well have packed it in years ago. But as proud as I am of what worked, I’m also proud of what didn’t – and that we weren’t too proud to let some things go.

The cartoon Sparksauce was limited to one edition. We still thought it was pretty funny.

Journalism and entrepreneurship are converging

I started editing Sparksheet fresh out of journalism school, after a short stint in Washington covering the 2008 U.S. election and financial crisis. I had my reservations about taking a job outside of the traditional journalism world, about working for a content agency instead of a news agency.

But I soon discovered what became part of our editorial mission – that “we are living in a world where media outlets are becoming more like brands and brands are becoming more like media.” I thought that was pretty clever when I wrote it, but it already sounds quaint.

Many of the so-called traditional media types I’ve interviewed over the years have since gone on to join startups or reinvent themselves as brand consultants. One of our most popular posts was my Q&A with Blake Eskin, who in 2010 was the web editor of The New Yorker.

As our friend – and another entrepreneurial journalist – Craig Silverman wrote in May, journalists and content marketers have a lot to learn from each other. And I’m not even sure what the difference is between “brands” and “media” anymore, are you?

Sparksheet’s first feature explored branded entertainment in Cuba.

Content marketing has gotten complicated

In the past few months I’ve spoken to three of the most disruptive players in the content marketing space – Shane Smith, co-founder of freelancer network Contently (stay tuned for our Q&A in the coming weeks), Shafqat Islam, CEO of content syndication service NewsCred, and Jon Steinberg, the president of new media juggernaut BuzzFeed.

The first two companies didn’t even exist in their current incarnations when Sparksheet was launched, while BuzzFeed has evolved from the poster child for “listicles” about cats to the standard bearer for what people are now calling “native advertising.”

In just four and a half years we’ve seen content marketing go from being a B2B niche with a handful of aspiring thought leaders to the apparent saviour of media, marketing and the planet.

What this means is that the content ecosystem is no longer just about clients and agencies but about the complex, symbiotic relationship between brands, agencies, startups, publishers, freelancers, consultants and, of course, the people formerly known as the audience. Once again, things have gotten complicated.

So thank you for your readership and contributions throughout the years. Special thanks to my bosses, Raymond Girard and Arjun Basu, for their support and trust, to my editorial assistant, Sophie Woodrooffe, for her hard work and dedication, and to our design guru, Charles Lim, for his responsive eye and breakfast-for-lunch companionship.

]]>NewsCred is well known for pivoting its focus and business model quite dramatically. Can you explain what the mission was early on, and how that’s led you to what you’re doing now?

We used to operate a B2C site called NewsCred.com. This was around the time when social news was really big and sites like Digg and Reddit were doing really well. So we said, “All of these sites are based on popularity. What if we took a different angle and looked at quality?”

It was a cool idea but it’s more of a non-profit idea than a real business, which is why we pivoted the first time. We went from a B2C site to a B2B business and the primary reason for doing that was to solve some of the pain we felt when operating this news site.

We wanted to license content for our site and it was extremely painful. The only options out there were AP and Reuters.

First of all, we found that strange. Why are there only those two options when there’s all this amazing content being created all over the world? And then we looked at the existing newswire ecosystem and decided it was ripe for disruption because from a pure tech side, not much had changed in the last 20 or 30 years.

What happened next was less of a pivot, but more discovering a new type of customer: the brand marketers.

Eighteen months ago, we got a call from Johnson & Johnson saying, “We need content for this app we’re marketing to doctors.” Initially we said, “Wrong number, we don’t sell to marketers.” And then we realized, “Wait a minute, maybe this is an opportunity.” And since then, the business took off.

NewsCred collaborated with The Chicago Tribune to create the Digital Plus version, which gives subscribers access to stories from The Economist and Forbes.

Your approach to branded content is all about curating existing content for brands, rather than creating new, custom content. Why do you think that’s a better approach for brands?

We took a bet on premium content and said, “There’s so much amazing journalism being created, whether it’s by The Economist, FT or an amazing industry trade magazine, why don’t we help these content creators find distribution channels, find new monetization opportunities and at the same time, because this content is so good, use technology to give it an extended shelf life?”

By extended shelf life I mean, you create something, it goes on your website, it eventually just creates dust in your archives.

If we could patch it up with articles about the same topic from 10 other amazing publishers and put together something that a brand values and a brand is willing to pay for, we could solve problems for two sides of our marketplace – both the content creators and the brands who wanted content.

Long term, a brand is going to have to invest in both curated or licensed content and custom, original content. We’re going to solve both of those problems.

We are building a NewsCred content network where you can actually get custom content, so we’ll be providing access to world class writers and journalists.

We recently spoke to the President of BuzzFeed who said he thinks the age of creating custom platforms for brands is coming to an end, and that the trend seems to be moving toward so-called “native advertising.” It sounds like you think a combination is the way forward.

I agree with him that distribution is key when it comes to content marketing. A lot of brands think about the content part of content marketing, but not the distribution. If there’s a publisher that has amazing distribution built in, like BuzzFeed, then you absolutely have to think about creating content for that platform.

To me, BuzzFeed is just another distribution channel. Whenever you find a good distribution channel, you need to create content or find content that’s appropriate for that channel.

NewsCred boasts its own editorial team, but you’re known as a tech startup with some sophisticated algorithms for curating content. Is the future of editorial about people or machines, or some combination of both?

We’re a software startup and we’re venture backed, so one of the most important things to think about is how to build a scalable business. We were 100 percent algorithmic curation until a few months ago. What we realized is that, yes, that’s what’s ultimately going to scale our business.

But there are certain things that, no matter how good you are at computer science and search algorithms, human beings will always do better. There’s a reason why there are incredible editors who work at storied newspapers. There’s something special about them.

As software guys, we can’t be too proud to say that the human brain is often better than an algorithm. It’s just about finding the right balance.

NewsCred worked with Johnson & Johnson to help curate content for the BLACKBAG mobile app.

Do customers really need brands to curate their news and entertainment? Don’t we already have Twitter and Facebook, as well as platforms like Flipboard or Zite?

Curation is important, but even more important is the content itself. Is it useful, or interesting or entertaining? Can it change people’s lives in some way?

It shocks publishers when I say this, but if the content is good, people don’t care who wrote it or where it came from, as long as it’s high quality and impacts their lives in some way.

There’s a lot of people doing curation, but if you follow a brand on Twitter or Facebook or keep up with its email newsletter, wouldn’t you rather have interesting content pushed to you, versus getting $2 coupons every day?

Most of the brands you work with will have their own marketing and even content agencies of record. What role do they play in the branded experiences you create for them? Do you see agencies as partners or competitors?

Three quarters of our business is directly with the brand, about one quarter is through agencies or one of the brand’s agencies.

I think we’ve learned to love the agencies. The reason is that I’ve realized the CMO has so many different choices now, given that marketing technology has really exploded with a number of companies operating in the space. Their brains are so full they could explode.

I think agencies do a pretty good job at helping sift through all these startups and helping brands and CMOs navigate this space.

NewsCred is a pretty phenomenal startup success story, all the more so since you and your co-founders hail from Bangladesh. How do you think your Bangladeshi origins have influenced the direction and success of the company?

Purely from a product and business standpoint, we built our products to be international from day one and to handle multiple languages. We always licensed content globally, we always knew we were going to expand into foreign languages, so that global nature of the business was part of our DNA.

From a company culture standpoint, because we were in three countries in the very beginning and because we had our roots in Bangladesh, we always wanted to make sure we never treated one office as the home office and the others as offshore.

We do technology development around the clock from both New York and Bangladesh. We have amazing designers and engineers in both locations. I think culturally, it’s given us an opportunity to play to the strengths of amazing colleagues in three different countries.

]]>With your provocative Super Bowl ad featuring supermodel Kate Upton and a host of youth-oriented events and social media campaigns, it’s clear that Mercedes-Benz is courting a new audience. Isn’t this a risky strategy for such an esteemed brand?

We are a brand but at the same time, we are a business and we want to grow. We want to make sure we recognize and get ourselves in front of new markets and opportunities.

With the B-Class or the CLA or even into next year with our GLA, these products are at a lower price point in our fleet that is competitive with some mass brands that people would not typically consider us being in the same space as.

We want to make sure that people see us as a relevant, approachable and engaging brand. And our attitude and approach are just going to keep getting broader.

A lot of this content is aimed at a younger audience. Is the idea to capture their attention now so they will purchase Mercedes cars later (when they can afford to) or are you looking at a whole different class of driver?

It’s a little bit of both. We want to get people engaged because we’re not just a brand for their parents anymore. We’re actually the brand for anyone.

We’re thinking of people who are buying competitive, premium or mass products and who can say, “You know what? That’s an affordable product. That’s something I can actually put on my consideration list – something I haven’t done or haven’t considered, ever.”

At the same time, we do want the teenage boys to be putting up posters of the SLS on the wall and saying, “Wow, that’s a phenomenal sports car.” Maybe in a few years they’ll say, “You know, maybe I can actually afford it.”

Mercedes’ SLS AMG

We’ve been hearing the term “PopLux” bandied about these days in the luxury sector. How do you appeal to the younger, hipper crowd without alienating your traditional customers and diluting the exclusive element of the Mercedes brand?

Our culture is not one of luxury beyond belief, in the sense that every single element of your lifestyle is luxury.

People will buy products that may not be expensive but that they know are well made. But then they will indulge in certain things, be it a watch or a pair of shoes or a car.

The reality is that these things cost money. So it’s more a convergence of quality and elements of luxury rather than everything being luxury.

Are affordability and exclusivity compatible brand characteristics?

They are. The benchmark for quality, reliability and dependability, no matter what category, has risen. We’re not just asking for the quantity of products, we want the quality.

If it can be provided to you at an affordable price, then you’ll buy it in volume. We are no longer willing to accept anything below a certain standard and so that side of affordability and exclusivity plays into each other.

A print ad from the 2014 Mercedes CLA campaign.

The Mercedes S-Class has been called the closest thing yet to a self-driving car. How close are we to seeing a fully autonomous car on the road? I know that Elon Musk just threw down the gauntlet, saying Tesla will have one within three years.

Inevitably, technology and society and the integration of mobility will come into some kind of process so that there’s reduced congestion, higher degrees of safety, and all of the things that help a metropolitan environment move better.

With our new 2014 S-Class, where a lot of the autonomous technology ideas have been coming out, it’s the challenge between society and technology. Where are we willing to give up some aspects of control? There is a shift of accountability that society has to take into consideration. But the fact is, it is attainable.

At the same time, you want to get to the point where it’s preferable and not just on a high-end executive product. It’s also something that’s available in any vehicle line. That’s obviously a very far off point, but you can understand that the future is out there.

I won’t say it’s an end goal because you never know where it will end, but it’s definitely something that’s making people interested and engaged and intrigued by the kind of technology.

Do we really need self-driving cars? Some of us like to drive!

Funny enough, I was rooting around and I found my learner’s permit that I got when I was 16.

I’m in my forties now and I remember that desire, that feeling of having that level of control and all things that come along with driving. So personally I’d have a very hard time saying, “Yeah, I don’t need to drive anymore.”

I’ve heard that teenagers are getting their licenses later and sometimes not bothering with driving at all, so maybe that sense of freedom we used to associate with learning how to drive is being replaced by mobile phones or something else.

With development in metropolitan markets and with public transportation, a lot of younger people are saying, “I don’t need a car.” Or, maybe their lifestyle doesn’t require them to have one.

That’s why we have other solutions, like our car-to-go program where people can rent a car for an hour or a day, get in and go and do what they need and have no responsibilities to the vehicle.

Those are solutions that are working for society’s needs. Instead of the automotive industry asking people to conform, we’re trying to find ways to work within lifestyles.

Full disclosure: Mercedes-Benz Canada is a client of Spafax, the company that publishes Sparksheet.

]]>We don’t typically hear about content marketing for startups since startups need to stay “lean” and content is considered a luxury to some. Do you think it’s harder to make the case for content in the startup world?

The people who are known to be innovators in content marketing are consultants, agencies, big B2B companies, or consumer brands. You don’t see a lot on the startup side.

Most brands think you have to get the marketing basics in place, then build some content marketing program that sits adjacent to it. So startups think that content is too expensive or that it’s what you do after you’ve built your marketing engine.

Content marketing is crucial for a startup, it just can’t afford to have content sitting vertically within marketing. Content needs to cut horizontally, at the very least across the marketing function and ideally across the organization.

You work as VP of marketing at a startup called Kinvey, which calls itself a “Backend-as-a-Service” provider. What exactly does that mean and how do you create content marketing around it?

We started as a company that provided back-end service for individual developers. If you were looking to build a mobile app but you just didn’t have the bandwidth to build all that boiler plate functionality that every app needs, we pre-built it and it sits in the cloud.

We now offer that core platform with some heavy duty enterprise-grade functionality and we sell that cloud service to enterprise developers.

I create content by trying to zero in on what our audience is struggling with. I’ll talk to our sales team and ask what questions we get asked that we should have a good answer to but we don’t. So we’ll create content around that.

For example, one of the most common questions we were asked was how long it actually takes to build a mobile app on your own. It seemed like such an obvious question that no one had really thought to answer it and frankly that answer didn’t exist on the web.

We are starting to hear the term “growth hacking” a lot these days in the startup world. Do you think it differs much from regular old marketing?

I think in some ways growth hacking is the term used when an engineer works in a marketing department. Maybe engineers don’t want to say they work in marketing so they came up with a more engineering-friendly term!

But there is a movement towards left-brain marketing, or data-based marketing, and that is much more consistent with the inherent skill set of engineers.

Everybody is crazy about data these days. At the International Startup Festival you said that “science is beating the art side of marketing.” What did you mean by that?

When you’re talking about the art of marketing, it’s people’s opinion. Somebody likes one logo better than another, somebody likes this page design better than another. It’s very hard to solve politically because you’re talking about personalities and not data points.

In one way the science of marketing is refreshing because it validates the art. There is a better colour. Google has arrived at the perfect blue through tireless testing.

But in some ways the art is lost. When the only organ marketers value is their brain, we have entirely devalued an equally important organ which is the gut.

I still think that there is room in marketing for people to trust their instinct. Just because I have no data to support it makes it no less true.

Chernov collaborated with Robin Richards, head of design at ripetungi, to create this infographic, which is based on a Huffington Post article.

What lessons do you think marketers at bigger brands can learn from marketers at startups?

A huge CRM once asked me to create a piece of content in advance of their huge conference. We would create an infographic that was all about the different points of disruption in the technologies that surround sales and marketing professionals.

This company gave me a wink and said, “Make sure that some of the companies that we own are reflected in this graphic.” So there was this big line of bullshit running through the graphic because it was a little bit coerced.

We get to the end of it, they’re happy with it and their logos are all over it. We’re good to go, or so it seems.

It gets routed to legal and legal rejects it on the grounds that we don’t have the right to use their own logos and marks in that context. Big companies are constantly in their own way. When you operate like that nothing gets done.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/content-marketing-for-startups-qa-with-kinveys-joe-chernov/feed/2Dumb Ways to Die, Smart Way to Win: Q&A with McCann Australia’s John Mescallhttp://sparksheet.com/dumb-ways-to-die-smart-way-to-win-qa-with-mccann-australias-john-mescall/
http://sparksheet.com/dumb-ways-to-die-smart-way-to-win-qa-with-mccann-australias-john-mescall/#commentsWed, 21 Aug 2013 12:09:46 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18376A darkly comic musical PSA for the Melbourne Metro won more Cannes Lions awards this summer than any other campaign in the festival’s history. We spoke with creative director John Mescall about the ad’s drop-dead success.

“Dumb Ways to Die” won five Grand Prix awards and 28 Cannes Lions awards in total. Why do you think the ad was so successful? Did you expect it?

We had an inkling as we were making it that it actually might become very popular. Popularity and success are two slightly different things. It’s hard to have one without the other in social platforms.

We were very conscious that public service announcements, particularly those aimed at younger people, generally don’t work. There’s a history of failures in this category.

We studied PSAs and looked at the common denominators behind them all. There’s usually a message from an authority, they are usually warning you not to do something and suggesting horrible punishments if you do it, and they’re shocking and gruesome. PSAs are almost tailor-made not to work amongst young people.

We thought of approaching it from an entertainment model. Before viewers know it’s a warning not to do something – because the minute you know that, the game is up – they’ve already engaged with it, enjoyed it and thought about sharing it.

Is this branded content? Content marketing? Does it matter?

The campaign started with a song. It had to be good enough so people would actually buy it on iTunes. It’s not a jingle, it’s not a long ad, it’s a proper song and attributed to an artist we made up, called Tangerine Kitty.

The people we worked with, the musicians who did the music and the vocalists who sang it, don’t do advertising work and we deliberately chose them because we didn’t want it to feel like an ad.

Even great pieces of advertising don’t get shared on social media platforms anywhere near as much as things that don’t feel like ads.

How did you incentivize people to share the video?

We came to understand that public safety messages that come from authority figures don’t really work. We wanted this to be coming from peers. When it gets sent to you by a friend it’s a far more powerful message than if someone paid money to make you watch it.

That’s why the language of the campaign was important. We never tell you not to do it. We say it is exceptionally dumb. No teenager in the world will ever say to his or her friends, “Hey that doesn’t sound safe, you shouldn’t do that.” You can say to a friend, “You’re an idiot.” That’s okay.

We created a language that you can use to call out a friend for doing something dangerous without losing credibility with them.

Even if we had ten million dollars, paid media still wouldn’t have been the right way to go. Social was always going to bring more success than the traditional model. Though I think social is traditional now – we have to stop saying that.

How much did the fact that the ad was in service of a good cause contribute to its success? Would this sort of attention and praise be lavished on a for-profit message?

I think we’re one step ahead of the game when we’re genuinely trying to do good.

We live in an age where businesses and brands and private organizations are effectively more powerful than governments and government institutions. Governments are going bankrupt and brands have never been richer.

I think there is a level of responsibility now in the corporate world to be a force for good and the payoff for that is consumers with discretionary dollars will gravitate towards brands that actually try to do some good in the world.

How do you quantify the success of this ad? Is viral success or a truckload of Cannes Lions awards useful in getting people to be more careful around trains?

A print ad from the campaign.

There are two main measurements. The first was awareness. It sounds odd to say it but there was zero awareness of the fact that trains are dangerous. Most of the accidents were coming from completely innocent behavior.

Measure number two was behavioural change – getting people to actually change their behaviour as a result of the awareness and reduce the numbers of accidental injuries and deaths.

Within four weeks of the campaign launching, the majority of Melbournians in the target audience had seen the campaign and nearly 40 percent of teenagers told us in post analysis they would be more aware around trains and reduce their risk-taking behavior.

In the three months immediately following the campaign, accidents and deaths on the system had dropped 21 percent compared with the same time last year, and tens of thousands of schools are using this song and this video as a teaching tool in classrooms.

People aren’t really hanging their hats on those numbers as proof that the job is done, but it’s a really encouraging early sign.

Do you think there is anything unique about the environment in Australia that enabled this ad to happen and to be such a success?

I think culturally Australians are very open and honest. We like to think we have a working model and agency model where someone relatively junior can call bullshit on someone senior and for that to be okay.

Whenever we go into another market I am often surprised at how careful people are in conversations with each other.

Australians lack tact and I think that is useful in advertising. I don’t think you want to tiptoe around things when you have a marketing problem in front of you. You need troublemakers and you need people who feel empowered to change things and be different.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/dumb-ways-to-die-smart-way-to-win-qa-with-mccann-australias-john-mescall/feed/2Is This the Future of Content Marketing? Q&A with BuzzFeed President Jon Steinberghttp://sparksheet.com/is-this-the-future-of-content-marketing-qa-with-buzzfeed-president-jon-steinberg/
http://sparksheet.com/is-this-the-future-of-content-marketing-qa-with-buzzfeed-president-jon-steinberg/#commentsTue, 13 Aug 2013 02:04:42 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=18196Call it “native advertising” or “social content marketing,” BuzzFeed has cracked the code. We spoke to Jon Steinberg about what it takes to relentlessly roll out viral content while serving the brands that power the platform.

]]>BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti has said that 100 percent of BuzzFeed’s revenue comes from what he calls “social content marketing.” How does social content marketing differ from the content marketing we all know and love?

We call it “social” because it really is word-of-mouth marketing online. There’s really nothing new about this. That’s one of the things that has given me great confidence as we’ve done it. It’s basically the advertising type stuff that David Ogilvy did.

Advertorials and word-of-mouth have been a force in marketing and research since the 1950s. We’re just doing that online. It’s going back to good advertising and getting away from banners, which were always a terrible advertising product.

I don’t think we’re the inventors of branded content marketing online, but I think we’re the most committed to it. This year we’ll do 500 or 600 branded content campaigns, all with direct-sold Fortune 1000 brands.

Can you unpack the process of creating branded content at BuzzFeed? Do editors, agencies or the brands themselves develop the stories?

We start by talking to brands and their agencies about what they want to convey. It could be something as simple as a new product introduction or a television show launch. Then we brainstorm with the agency about what they want to convey about that, what story they want to tell.

Then our team typically takes assets – videos, images, whatever’s available – and creates a variant of that content. Then we send it back to the brand and agency for feedback and approval.

We have 30 people that work on branded content that report to me – not Ben Smith, our editor-in-chief. They are completely walled off from our editorial team. It’s essential that you build that wall if you’re going to go into any kind of advertising.

But you’re still applying the same secret sauce that goes into your editorial to your native advertising content. Isn’t that the point?

Yes, it’s the same style to the extent of best practices and writing, format and the publishing system. It’s all one system that’s used by everybody. The technology is the same, and I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s been so successful.

How do you ensure that branded content is “on brand” for both BuzzFeed and the advertiser?

BuzzFeed’s newsfeed includes a mix of sponsor, emotional and hard news content.

BuzzFeed has dramatically broadened over the past year, with us doing everything from business content to DIY, from fashion and entertainment to tech. We get 60 million unique visitors a month, we have a wide range of content and there’s a very social skew to the formatting and style of the content.

We would never run a piece of advertising like, “Buy this stuff now for $9.” We don’t do what I call “shouts in a vacuum.” It has to be about a message. There has to be reciprocity. The brand has to give some content or something of interest in exchange for a little bit of attention.

We go back and forth with the brands. We collaborate, but I think that’s the way advertising needs to be.

How do you find the sweet spot between content that gets spread and content that promotes the brand? Some people might not realize, for example, that Prius sponsored the Hybrid Animals article.

In any campaign, we’re doing five to ten pieces of content, minimum. There’s a range of content that sits on the spectrum between getting people excited about what the brand stands for and about the brand’s attributes.

Take the Toyota Prius campaign. The goal of the Hybrid Animals post was to speak to the fact that Toyota is a brand that has humour and that understands the culture of young people. There’s a wink to Napoleon Dynamite with the Liger.

The challenge is if you unbalance yourself in either direction. If it’s so fun and interesting but doesn’t convey a brand attribute, you have an issue. If it’s only about why a product is awesome, with no give or interest, then you’ve similarly erred.

BuzzFeed published a Toyota sponsored post about hybrid animals, which went viral.

It’s been an evolving process since we launched it. It’s open to agencies and to brands as well. We’re doing this pilot with VaynerMedia during the summer and will let some more agencies in as well.

With Vayner, we’re doing a five-week training program followed by an accreditation test. It addresses the fundamental question of how you convey brand attributes and at the same time make it shareable and offer something up to the reader.

And then there are very technical things, too: how to use our super poster, how to do the image list, how to reorder items.

When you’re innovating a new platform like we are, you have to offer education. That’s why Facebook offers the Preferred Marketing Developer program. It’s an essential piece of doing a new platform.

What do you think about brands that are trying to build their own platforms – blogs, magazines, web series? Is that a waste of time when you can access existing channels and audiences?

When I got here three years ago, brands wanted to post things on their own microsites. No one really believes that anymore. Everybody now has the view that you fish where the fish are.

When I write posts on marketing I publish on Medium; when I have something that’s more tactical that explains how we operate efficiently, I publish through the LinkedIn Influencer program. I go to where the platform is right to put the content. It doesn’t really make sense for me to post content on my own blog anymore.

Do you think the BuzzFeed platform is a good fit for every brand?

BuzzFeed pushes branded content from GE on its publication because even aviation nerds use the internet.

Any brand that wants to do content and any brand that wants to do social is a brand for us. We work with all the insurance companies, a lot of the auto companies, a lot of the CPG companies.

We have lots of people that are interested in science and technology that work in lots of different professions. It makes sense to do a B2B marketing campaign for GE around aviation with us because there’s a lot of young people in the aviation and industrial fields that read BuzzFeed.

They’re human beings that like fun stuff, too. That doesn’t mean that GE shouldn’t advertise in aviation magazines, but it does mean that with social targeting, there’s going to be somebody interested in aviation that’s going to send that awesome content to other people that are interested in aviation. The content finds its audience.

In his own words

]]>http://sparksheet.com/is-this-the-future-of-content-marketing-qa-with-buzzfeed-president-jon-steinberg/feed/18Live Feed: International Startup Festival 2013http://sparksheet.com/live-feed-international-startup-festival-2013/
http://sparksheet.com/live-feed-international-startup-festival-2013/#commentsWed, 10 Jul 2013 15:00:34 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17876Sparksheet is proud to be the official content partner of this year’s International Startup Festival, which takes place in Montreal from July 10-13. More than 50 speakers will be presenting on everything from marketing to funding to Big Data and we’ll be there to capture their Startup Stories. This is our notebook of inspiring and insightful tweets, Vines, […]

]]>Sparksheet is proud to be the official content partner of this year’s International Startup Festival, which takes place in Montreal from July 10-13.

More than 50 speakers will be presenting on everything from marketing to funding to Big Data and we’ll be there to capture their Startup Stories. This is our notebook of inspiring and insightful tweets, Vines, Instagram photos and other #Startupfest buzz from around the social web.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/live-feed-international-startup-festival-2013/feed/1Things Have Gotten Complicatedhttp://sparksheet.com/things-have-gotten-complicated/
http://sparksheet.com/things-have-gotten-complicated/#commentsFri, 05 Jul 2013 21:06:59 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17949One of the first things (maybe THE first thing) I ever wrote for Sparksheet was a dissection of Robert Scoble’s Social Media Starfish, a diagram of the social media landscape in 2009: Now, Brian Solis has come out with his fourth iteration of The Conversation Prism. Look how far we’ve come: If nothing […]

]]>http://sparksheet.com/things-have-gotten-complicated/feed/1Confessions of a Marketing Scientist: Q&A with MIT Media Lab’s Sandra Y. Richterhttp://sparksheet.com/confessions-of-a-marketing-scientist-qa-with-mit-media-labs-sandra-y-richter/
http://sparksheet.com/confessions-of-a-marketing-scientist-qa-with-mit-media-labs-sandra-y-richter/#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 14:22:49 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17709You’ve heard of gamification, but how about persuasive technology? We spoke with Sandra Y. Richter, a “marketing scientist” at MIT Media Lab and one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” about the connection between data, psychology and urban mobility.

I was in need of a term for what I do. I’m trying to use technology to look at questions our society wants answered. I come into the science world with a marketing perspective. I’m a marketing scientist.

Does marketing need a more scientific grounding?

It’s the other way around. Science needs marketing. Marketers are very human-centred – they try to understand the user, they try to understand the market and they do market research. Science lacks that a little bit.

Your research is focused on something called “persuasion profiling” and how it can be used to encourage more sustainable choices when it comes to urban transportation. Can you break it down for us?

We look at persuasion and how to change behaviour. Around 2002, the term “persuasive technology” was coined by B.J. Fogg. I thought there was a perspective missing – target marketing.

Google has all our data and knows exactly who we are, so why not leverage that in a good way for behaviour change? That’s persuasion profiling. I try to change people’s opinions about and behaviours towards cars or bikes, movement in general and healthy living.

Is “persuasive technology” just another word for what’s popularly known as “gamification”? I have a feeling you must be sick of that term already.

I don’t love the term gamification. When I came to the Media Lab a lot of people were like, “Great, if you bike longer or bike more we’ll give you a coffee at Starbucks” and they would “gamify” the whole thing. But it’s more complex than that.

Persuasive technology is very subtle and it comes from a psychological point of view, so it’s sometimes hard to describe. But if I say it’s a little bit like gamification then it makes it easier to understand.

That said, I don’t think persuasive technology is the right word, either. I’m going to be sitting down with Kevin Slevin, one of the professors at the Media Lab, to try to find a new term for the whole thing.

Spike is an app prototype that Richter worked on in collaboration with Yael Alkalay and Vadik Bakman for her MIT Media Lab Thesis. The app is meant as an add-on for bike share programs to promote social biking.

What are some persuasion profiling strategies? Can you give us an example?

There are a lot of persuasive strategies out there. The most popular are self-monitoring, rewards, competition and collaboration. You see who responds to rewards, who responds to collaboration, etc.

For example, the Austrian Institute of Technology approached me and said, “We need to figure out how to make a multi-model trip recommendation engine,” which is basically Google Maps, but they wanted the application to promote electric car-share systems.

I used persuasion profiling to figure out what type of people are lead users. The young entrepreneur is more likely to take an electric car than the mom with three kids, for example. Then we defined what types of young entrepreneurs there are.

So how does technology change the way we navigate a city?

Scientists can very exactly see all the mobility patterns of people. There are sensors in our phones and in the environment. We can react to that and make smarter bus schedules, tell people to take different routes if there’s traffic, and understand where we need to build schools and infrastructure.

For example, in Boston we have an application called “See Click Fix,” where users can take a picture of a pothole and send it to the city. Here you have automated data collection and you have crowd-sourced data.

Does that mean cities are getting smarter or are they just getting more digital?

They have the potential to be smart. We just had the head of the Smart City movement at IBM in the lab. I was amazed at how little they can do with the data they are collecting. They found out a lot about water quality or how much traffic there is but the information stays at the level of data collection.

Richter, along with Nan Zhao (pictured) and Ines Gaisset, is also involved in the creation of smart urban furniture at the MIT Media Lab. The benches are outfitted with solar panels to create charging and wifi stations for mobile devices.

You’re still a marketer as well as a scientist. How do you apply your work on persuasion profiling to brands?

Right now I’m in the academic field but I do work a little bit with the Media Lab sponsors. I just talked with Audi and State Farm Insurance Company and they want to know what they are going to do if people don’t have cars and use mobility-on-demand instead.

I also work a lot with Volkswagen. They want to know how people will interact with cars in the future. Will Volkswagen be a platform? A service? I try to figure out how these brands can shift themselves in an agile way to become platform- or service-centred brands. The brand relationship changes when they are offering services and on-demand goods rather than ownership.

A lot of your work revolves around mobility and travel. With the rise of bike sharing and car sharing and hospitality networks like AirBnB, do you think that travel will become more social?

With air travel I’m not sure, but with cars it’s definitely going in a more social direction. We have more car sharing in general, but also more peer-to-peer car-sharing programs. I would definitely enjoy more social aspects in all mobility modes.

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to make biking more social. That doesn’t mean slapping a social network on it, but creating the awareness that you can bike together.

In Europe people bike together all the time, and it makes biking safer and more fun. I would love to propose to make two bike lanes next to each other. Cars have two, three, four lanes next to each other. Why don’t we do that for bikes?

A lot of the time we lose the childishness of biking. If you observe kids biking they have so much fun. Why do we get so serious about travel? Why can’t we find a way of making it fun and juvenile again?

]]>http://sparksheet.com/confessions-of-a-marketing-scientist-qa-with-mit-media-labs-sandra-y-richter/feed/1The Purpose-Driven Company: Q&A with Whole Foods’ John Mackeyhttp://sparksheet.com/the-purpose-driven-company-qa-with-whole-foods-john-mackey/
http://sparksheet.com/the-purpose-driven-company-qa-with-whole-foods-john-mackey/#commentsWed, 12 Jun 2013 14:02:04 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17587“An entrepreneur is like a parent,” says John Mackey, the co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market. We spoke to him about his “child” – the 34-year-old health food giant – and why he doesn’t trust the media.

You’ve said that you think companies today ought to be “purpose-driven.” Do you think there’s a difference between a purpose and a brand?

Brand is just an abstraction. I use that word sometimes but I’m not a big fan of the word because sometimes when people talk about managing their brand they move away from authenticity.

Your brand is just the way people think about the company or the product, so I don’t think the brand is more important than the purpose or the values of the organization.

I sometimes think businesses get that confused. If you want to have a good reputation sometimes you try to manipulate people into thinking better about your brand, and then you’re off track.

Do you see an opportunity to extend the Whole Foods mission beyond produce, to other products and services?

We continue to evolve and our higher purposes are continuing to evolve.

One thing we’ve done in the last couple of years is start the Whole Kids Foundation. We’ve already given away over 2000 salad bars to schools and over 1000 garden grants, and this is only in a couple of years.

This could help our children have a different connection to food and gardening, and a different connection to their health by eating fresher foods. This could end up evolving into one of our higher purposes.

Through Whole Kids Foundation, children are given the opportunity to grow their own food. Image via Whole Kids Foundation’s Facebook Page.

One advantage of being a purpose-driven brand is that you tend to attract like-minded people. Do you see an opportunity to create a community around Whole Foods, particularly online?

Yeah, we are the first- or second-largest company on Twitter and we just had a social media video we produced – “Dark Rye” – win a James Beard award.

We’re very conscious of this. You’ve identified one of the things we want to do but I think we’ve barely gotten started on it. We haven’t yet integrated those higher purposes into our online communities to the extent we could and should.

As my co-CEO says, we’re not retailers with a mission, we’re missionaries who retail.

You represent Whole Foods as co-CEO but you’re also a thought leader in your own right with a book, a blog and regular speaking gigs. Is there ever a tension between what you think as an individual versus what you can say as founder of Whole Foods?

Those are different things. My book is about “conscious capitalism” and that’s part of what Whole Foods has been doing for a long time and other companies as well. But I made a distinction a long time ago and I use an analogy to get people to see it.

When parents have children they love their children but as the children grow up, a healthy parent understands that the child is not themselves. You see all kinds of television shows where the father wants the son to be just like him – that’s a type of narcissism.

An entrepreneur is like a parent who creates a business but at some point the business has its own destiny apart from the entrepreneur. I do not see Whole Foods as an extension of myself. I see it as 34 years old, it’s grown up now, and I’m serving it.

I’m trying to help it flourish just like a good parent would help their child flourish.

The interior of a Whole Foods in New York. Photo by David Shankbone via Flickr.

I’ve noticed that when you talk about journalists or “the media” you don’t seem particularly fond of us. Am I reading into things?

No, you’re not reading into it. I feel like I’ve been misrepresented by the media frequently. I don’t trust the media.

Sometimes I talk about journalists having a higher purpose, which should be to uncover the truth, and I think many journalists have gotten too deep into postmodern thinking that “it’s all narrative” and there’s no “right” narrative.

When you don’t believe there’s any kind of objective truth then you can come up with any narrative you want to. So they’ve moved away from what I think the higher purpose of journalism is.

We may not know the truth in any absolute sense but the journalist looks and digs to unveil the complexity of truth. The journalist with integrity is always seeking to throw more light on things.

So when I’ve felt slandered by journalists it’s because they made no attempt to represent what I said and they made no attempt to really discover what I believed and felt. They already had a story written and they just wanted to get a couple of sensationalist quotes to fill out their story.

Sparksheet Editor Dan Levy in conversation with John Mackey at C2-MTL.

In his own words

]]>http://sparksheet.com/the-purpose-driven-company-qa-with-whole-foods-john-mackey/feed/5Where Creativity Meets Commerce: Dispatches and Lessons from C2-MTL 2013http://sparksheet.com/where-creativity-meets-commerce-dispatches-and-lessons-from-c2-mtl-2013/
http://sparksheet.com/where-creativity-meets-commerce-dispatches-and-lessons-from-c2-mtl-2013/#commentsMon, 27 May 2013 02:40:37 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17295Richard Branson, Philippe Starck, Diane von Furstenberg and other business and design luminaries were in Montreal last week for C2-MTL, an elite business conference that explored the intersection of commerce and creativity. Here's our roundup of the best tweets, photos and ideas to come out of the event.

C2-MTL 2013 took place in an old shipyard built in 1846 at the foot of Montreal’s Lachine Canal. Photo by Kristina Velan.

C2-MTL is a hard event to write about. As we explained last year, the event strives to “reinvent the business conference” by emphasizing interaction as much as information, experience as much as education and aesthetics as much as content.

Between formal sessions with big-name speakers such as Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, makeup mogul Bobbi Brown and Whole Foods founder John Mackey, C2’s well-heeled attendees – tickets cost upwards of $3,600 – could take in a show by Cirque du Soleil (a major sponsor), participate in a hands-on workshop, or even do a little yoga.

Cirque du Soleil’s opening performance. Photo by Kristina Velan.

A Big Data workshop at C2-MTL. Photo by Kristina Velan.

Why not a yoga class between sessions? Photo by Kristina Velan.

As with any eclectic event, every attendee’s experience of C2-MTL was different. Still, we noticed some recurring themes and ideas emerging from the stream of tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related social media activity.

Empowering women

At the first C2-MTL conference last year, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was the only female speaker of note. This year, creative and successful women including Bobbi Brown, Diane von Furstenberg and MIT media lab director Neri Oxman drew some of the largest crowds and the role of women in business, design and culture was celebrated throughout the three-day event.

“As a young girl, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew who I wanted to be. An independent woman”- diane von furstenberg #c2mtl #fashion #women #stylechat

Now on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtlNow on stage: Tom Gentile, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. Talking about the innovation about the breast cancer screening #c2mtl

Data versus intuition

Big Data was a major buzzword at C2-MTL 2013, with Intel’s Steve Brown and Bitly’s Hilary Mason both building their talks around the subject.

But it seems the Big Data backlash has begun as several speakers, including Branson and veteran Hollywood producer Barry Diller (also von Furstenberg’s husband), emphasized that experience, intuition and gut instinct can’t be overestimated when it comes to making business decisions.

Big data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTLBig data helps you choose between A and B but doesn’t tell you what question to ask in the first place -@hmason #C2MTL

“I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL”I go by my gut, believe in breaking the rules and see possibility where others don’t.” -Bobbi at #C2MTL

“I never get accountants in to look at our business ideas … You need an instinct based on experience.” – Sir Richard Branson #C2MTL
— Emma Jane McKay (@emmajanemckay)
May 23, 2013

Barry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTLBarry Diller sounding very Jobsian talking about “instincts” and “purity” – but is he part of dying breed in age of #bigdata? #C2MTL

Rebels with a cause

C2-MTL bills itself as “a business conference, only different” and that spirit of disruption and rebellion permeated the event.

Just for Laughs founder Andy Nulman brashly delivered an “improvised dissertation on creativity,” using slides he’d never seen before, after having criticized last year’s C2 speakers for being too conventional. Legendary industrial designer Philippe Starck, controversial former BMW designer Chris Bangle and, of course, Branson also brandished their roguish credentials.

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

“I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL”I see sex on TV, sex in magazines and in the cinema, but not on furtniture. But where do you fuck?” – @Starckofficial #C2MTL

Nicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTLNicole Vollebregt’s “Never be afraid to get fired” echoes @AndyNulman: If you don’t sometimes fail you’re not being creative enough #C2MTL

‘There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL’There is no creativity without the risk of outright failure’ -@andynulman in improvised presentation on creativity #C2MTL

Failures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtlFailures that motivated Arkadi Kuhlmann: kicked out of house at 17 & dumped by his fiancé because he didn’t make enough money #c2mtl

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Another recurring theme at C2-MTL was the notion that creativity doesn’t occur in a vacuum. This means keeping your eyes open and engaging with the world around you or, as Nulman put it, getting “off the floor and out the door.” In his talk, Ideo’s Fred Dust assured the crowd that they shouldn’t hesitate to steal ideas – so long as they made them better.

Defining creativity

C2-MTL is all about the intersection of commerce and creativity and so the question of what creativity means – particularly in a business context – came up a lot. Even “data is a creativity industry,” Bitly chief scientist Hilary Mason proclaimed.

Embracing the arts

Just as C2-MTL celebrated the role of creativity in business, it welcomed the art world into the conversation with opera and dance performances, a fashion show, an evolving photography exhibit (featuring C2 attendees as subjects) and even a live house band jamming between speakers.

At times the performances inadvertently served to underscore the difference between the attendees and the artists by framing creativity as “entertainment” rather than something intrinsic to the business world (the inclusion of artist-entrepreneurs like Starck and von Furstenberg was much more effective in bridging commerce and creativity), but they certainly kept C2-MTL from feeling like any other business conference.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/where-creativity-meets-commerce-dispatches-and-lessons-from-c2-mtl-2013/feed/18In Defense of Sales: Q&A With Daniel H. Pinkhttp://sparksheet.com/in-defense-of-sales-qa-with-daniel-h-pink/
http://sparksheet.com/in-defense-of-sales-qa-with-daniel-h-pink/#commentsTue, 21 May 2013 17:39:13 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17223Not everyone works in sales, but we’re pretty much all salespeople. That’s the message of Daniel H. Pink’s latest book, To Sell Is Human. We spoke to the bestselling author about what this means for brands and individuals.

A lot of us think of sales as sleazy and slimy and manipulative because for a long time, most of what we knew about sales came from an age of information asymmetry.

The seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information, the seller can rip you off. This is why we have the principle of “buyer beware.”

I think that’s changed. We’ve gone from a world of information asymmetry to one closer to information parity.

This transition – from buyers who don’t have much information, not many choices and no way to talk back, to [buyers who] have lots of information, lots of choices and all kinds of ways to talk back – has changed the game, moving us from a world of “buyer beware” to one of “seller beware.”

And this all happened in the last ten years, thanks to the internet and social media?

That’s been a big force. I think sales has changed more in the last decade than it did in the previous five decades combined. The shift in the information balance between buyer and seller is like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

You focus on two industries in the book that aren’t usually front of mind when you hear talk about sales: education and health care. Why is that?

I was trying to explain why people are reporting that they’re spending a lot of time moving, persuading and influencing people. You’d get this pretty high number in the U.S. at least, 41 percent [of workers surveyed].

One of the things that really jumped out at me was where the jobs were. If you look at the U.S. labour market data, the jobs are coming from education and health care services.

Talk to any teacher and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s what I’m doing. I’m selling the idea of paying attention in class, I’m selling the idea of doing your homework.” And in some ways, medicine is, “I’m selling you on the idea of quitting smoking, I’m selling you on the idea of exercising more,” and so forth.

One word we hear about a lot in the digital content world these days is “curation.” You suggest that curation is the key to being a successful salesperson or brand as well. Can you unpack that?

I actually resisted using it because it’s so prominent in the world of content. Folks in online businesses have heard that word a gazillion times but most civilians have not.

The idea is this: It used to be that having access to information was some kind of advantage, but now everybody has access to information. If I want to know the GDP of Sweden, I can find it in ten seconds. So having access to information doesn’t matter. What matters more is being able to take that information and make sense of it, not only on your own behalf but also on behalf of other people.

Is that related to your idea of “problem finding” versus “problem solving”?

Frederic March in the 1951 film, Death of a Salesman

Yes, it’s an important concept, too. If you know exactly what your problem is, then you can find a solution without a salesperson, without anyone else. If I know my problem is that all I need to do is find the GDP of Sweden, I don’t need any help.

Where I need help is if I’m asking the wrong question, or if I’m wrong about my problem. There has been a move from problem solving to problem finding, from solving existing problems to identifying problems people don’t realize they have.

In the sales context, if you know exactly what your problem is, you don’t need a salesperson. So problem solving still matters, but it matters relatively less. Problem finding is a more valuable skill.

Are we seeing the roles of what’s traditionally seen as a consultant versus a salesperson blurring?

Yeah, and that’s been happening for a while. There’s a whole move towards what’s called consultative sales. I think what’s really going on is something that others have written about as well, which is this move from selling products and event services to selling insights.

It’s particularly true in business-to-business sales. One of the things that comes out with all the interviews with B2B salespeople is how much you need to understand the customer’s or prospect’s business, and so it is tiptoeing a little away from peddling products and a bit towards management consulting and generating insights.

Have you got any pushback from actual professional salespeople when you say that we’re all in sales? Should they be worried about their industry being disrupted by amateurs?

It’s a great question. There’s been a little bit of that, but less than I would have thought. Where I’ve gotten some distressed emails is from salespeople who say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe that people have such a dim view of sales!”

Part of the argument of the book is that we should take sales more seriously – that sales isn’t the glad-handing, slick, somewhat duplicitous profession it’s stereotyped as, but that it requires a great degree of intellectual sophistication and insight.

So for everyone who says, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re allowing people to say sales is so grim,” I have a couple more who say, “Wow, I’m glad you’re taking sales seriously.”

]]>http://sparksheet.com/in-defense-of-sales-qa-with-daniel-h-pink/feed/15C2-MTL 2013 Live Feedhttp://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/
http://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/#commentsTue, 21 May 2013 11:07:20 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17200From May 21-23, Sparksheet will be reporting live from C2-MTL, an unconventional business conference in Montreal that’s all about the intersection of commerce and creativity. With a speaker roster that includes Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Diane von Furstenberg, and an elite group of c-suite attendees (tickets cost upwards of $3,600), the event is sure […]

]]>From May 21-23, Sparksheet will be reporting live from C2-MTL, an unconventional business conference in Montreal that’s all about the intersection of commerce and creativity.

With a speaker roster that includes Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Diane von Furstenberg, and an elite group of c-suite attendees (tickets cost upwards of $3,600), the event is sure to generate plenty of online buzz.

This is our notebook of interesting and inspiring blogs, tweets, Instagram photos and other C2-related content from around the web, powered by our friends at Spundge.

C2-MTL

The Sparksheet team curates the most interesting and insightful content around C2-MTL 2013.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/c2mtl2013/feed/13CTRL ALT Delete: Google+ Hangout with Mitch Joelhttp://sparksheet.com/ctrl-alt-delete-google-hangout-with-mitch-joel/
http://sparksheet.com/ctrl-alt-delete-google-hangout-with-mitch-joel/#commentsFri, 10 May 2013 20:25:03 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=17134It gets harder every year to think of an industry that hasn’t been disrupted by the internet. Brands big and small are finding themselves sandwiched between a dead (or dying) business model and an uncertain future. Blogger, podcaster and Twist Image president Mitch Joel calls this state “purgatory” and in his new book, CTRL ALT […]

]]>It gets harder every year to think of an industry that hasn’t been disrupted by the internet. Brands big and small are finding themselves sandwiched between a dead (or dying) business model and an uncertain future.

Blogger, podcaster and Twist Image president Mitch Joel calls this state “purgatory” and in his new book, CTRL ALT Delete, he argues that it’s time for businesses and individuals to “reboot.”

Mitch has been a friend of Sparksheet since the beginning and he joined us for a Google+ Hangout to talk about his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which comes out on May 21.

Our conversation covers everything from screen shifting and mobile marketing, to how to have “safe sex with data” and why the world should be a little more “squiggly.”

]]>http://sparksheet.com/ctrl-alt-delete-google-hangout-with-mitch-joel/feed/4Want to Join the Sparksheet Team?http://sparksheet.com/want-to-join-the-sparksheet-team/
http://sparksheet.com/want-to-join-the-sparksheet-team/#commentsWed, 03 Apr 2013 19:43:25 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16797If you’re full of good ideas and passionate about content, media and marketing, then come join Sparksheet for the summer! We’re looking for a smart, web-savvy editorial intern to spend a few months with us in our Montreal office. As Sparksheet’s editorial intern, you’ll work with our content and design teams to create and curate […]

]]>If you’re full of good ideas and passionate about content, media and marketing, then come join Sparksheet for the summer! We’re looking for a smart, web-savvy editorial intern to spend a few months with us in our Montreal office.

As Sparksheet’s editorial intern, you’ll work with our content and design teams to create and curate content across our award-winning platforms. You’ll also be involved in day-to-day editorial stuff like researching images, navigating our CMS, and coming up with story ideas.

Because we’re a small team, you’ll be encouraged to bring your own unique skills, talents and interests to the table. Journalism students, recent graduates, and anyone with relevant writing and editorial experience will be considered. Design skills and social media chops are always a plus.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/want-to-join-the-sparksheet-team/feed/4Greening the Cloud: Q&A with David Bellonahttp://sparksheet.com/greening-the-cloud-qa-with-david-bellona/
http://sparksheet.com/greening-the-cloud-qa-with-david-bellona/#commentsTue, 02 Apr 2013 21:10:11 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16714The cloud is heavier than you think. We spoke to David Bellona, an interaction designer at Twitter who we met at SXSW, about the physical footprint of our increasingly prolific digital lives.

We are exponentially growing our computing power and we’re filling it up with our videos, texts and tweets. All of our digital lifestyles have a physical presence out there and that physical presence has to be powered by non-renewable energy resources.

The paradox is that the more efficient you make it to communicate with people and to send things, the more you’re going to do it. So instead of consuming less you actually consume more.

A key part of this is something called “the rebound effect,” whereby you have a lower carbon technology but you actually have a higher C02 output, simply because you’re using it more.

An email is 1/60th the carbon footprint of a letter, but when was the last time you sent a letter?

The prevailing wisdom is that because digital doesn’t kill trees and because content is stored in the intangible “cloud,” our environmental footprint is lighter than it was in the print age. Are you saying that because we’re actually producing and consuming more, it ultimately evens out?

I think the cloud actually is a more “environmentally friendly” way of communicating, we’re just doing it on a massive scale. One of the big questions is, after five, ten or 30 years, what do you do with all this data? Do you let it gracefully decompose over time? That’s why things like snapchat are pretty interesting.

Facebook has built five data centres in the last two and a half years and people are sharing 300 million photos a day on Facebook. A year ago, it was 200 million. This boggles the mind. And that’s just Facebook.

You’ve called data centres the “factories of the information age.” Can you describe them?

Think of a massive warehouse. That’s basically what they are. They’re just a giant room with columns and columns of servers. The other half of them are made up of cooling towers and cooling pipes in order to draw away all the heat from those servers.

They are basically the size of three Walmarts and they can have a draw power of anywhere upwards of 40 to 50 megawatts, which is basically the amount of power needed to run a small town.

Large data centres tend to be situated in rural areas where energy is cheaper. This Facebook data centre is located in Prineville, Oregon in the U.S.

They are sited at places where land is cheap and energy is cheap. They tend to be former industrial areas, or economically depressed areas, or farmland out in Western North Carolina, Oregon, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Dublin has become a giant European hub, and it’s because they have cheap energy – 84 percent of their electrical grid is from fossil fuels. Microsoft has got centres over there, HP, Dell, and a few other cloud servers are over there too. Amazon’s got a data centre in Dublin as well.

Globally, it’s been estimated that there are 500,000 data centres and obviously they’re not all these warehouse-sized ones. It’s mixed, Google has been estimated to have about 36.

Why the lack of information and transparency about how many data centres are out there?

The basic lack of transparency is from the competitive-edge standpoint.

If you were to divulge your amount of C02 and I know where you get your power from, then I know how much power you’re drawing in, and from that I can estimate how many servers you’re running, and how big your business is.

Some technology companies are making an effort to harness renewable energy sources like solar to power their data centres. Which companies are at the forefront of that?

Google is on the forefront as far as sourcing and renewable energy for data centres goes. They’ve been a huge investor in sustainable energy projects. They say they’ve invested over a billion dollars into it.

What they’ve done is purchased two 20-year power purchase agreements from two Iowa wind farms. It’s good for the wind farms because they’ve got that baseline purchase agreement for the next 20 years, which stabilizes the price.

Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, located in Oregon, is one of the largest in the world and was opened in September 2012. Google invested $100 million in the project. Image via wikipedia.org

There was a lot of backlash against Apple in mid-2012 from Greenpeace over a giant billion-dollar data centre in North Carolina. Since then, they’ve built two 20-megawatt solar panel farms, each the size of 76 football fields, or 100 acres.

HP is doing it as well. GreenQloud is in Iceland and Iceland’s electricity grid is powered 100 percent by green energy.

I think there’s a certain advantage in purchasing renewable energy as opposed to non-renewable energy. The amount of data out there is growing so fast that they have to build these huge facilities and green energy is a stable energy source.

With natural gas and coal you’re going to get more fluctuation in the price over time. You’re going to have a land grab, basically, for this power, so it’s more of a stable energy source for the very long term.

Do you think there’s just too much content, too much data, being generated? Is the problem one of production or consumption?

I think what’s really curious is that we used to express ourselves through consumption, in the clothes we wear and the things we buy.

Now I think we’re in an age where we self-actualize through the likes and through producing content. I put something out there and then in order for me to get affirmation from it, people also have to produce a like.

So basically that content now is literally the history of people’s communication. It’s the cataloguing of that. And it just grows and grows and grows.

Image via David Bellona.

We’re so used to hearing all this “engagement” and “interaction” by what Jay Rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience” framed as a positive thing. But it’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

It’s a paradox on many levels. The Information Diet by Clay Johnson came out last year and he writes about how the information you get from sources like OK! Magazine or content farms is fast-food garbage, as opposed to carefully curated, edited content.

We’re becoming content fiends. But what point do you stop? You snack here, you snack there, and before you know it, an hour is left. What are you getting out of it?

You’ve created a site called Tweet Farts, which tracks the carbon footprint of hashtags, and you’ve also created the concept app, Canary, that lets people monitor and compare their digital carbon footprints. How can design help us move forward?

Canary is a conceptual app created by Bellona that lets users compare with their friends the amount of CO2 they are generating on social networks.

There a lot of behavioural concepts we use, and a lot of it has to do with psychology tricks, things like defaults. As a designer you can take some of these “tricks” and you can bake that into a design or a user experience to nudge a user in a certain direction.

With Canary, the idea is to raise awareness of the problem and then give people a tool that enables them to either increase or decrease their online interactions and set benchmarks.

So users can personally offset their carbon footprint by supporting renewable energy projects or limit their interactions with cloud-based services that are sourcing their energy from non-renewable resources.

In the physical world, whether we choose to recycle something or throw it away, we’re typically so far removed from the process that we don’t see the consequences of our actions.

There’s something very unique about being able to see the immediate consequence of a digital interaction, no matter how small.

In his own words

]]>http://sparksheet.com/greening-the-cloud-qa-with-david-bellona/feed/14Coca-Cola’s Content Journey: Q&A with Ashley Brownhttp://sparksheet.com/coca-colas-content-journey-qa-with-ashley-brown/
http://sparksheet.com/coca-colas-content-journey-qa-with-ashley-brown/#commentsWed, 20 Mar 2013 13:09:05 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16627The Coca-Cola Company surprised the marketing world last fall by relaunching its website as a “digital magazine” called Coca-Cola Journey. We spoke to Ashley Brown, Director of Digital Communications and Social Media, about the company’s embrace of brand storytelling.

]]>You’ve called Coca-Cola Journey the biggest rethink of the company’s online presence since you launched your website in 1995. Your last major redesign was in 2005. How has Coca-Cola’s approach to content evolved over the years?

Prior to Journey, we viewed our corporate website as a static information point. It was designed to connect people to corporate information as quickly as possible, and we never deviated from that.

Today, with Journey, our focus is on storytelling. You can still find investors information or job postings easily, but we’re putting the core of Coca-Cola – our brands and their connection to our consumers – front and centre.

The New York Times referred to Coca-Cola Journey as an example of corporate storytelling, as opposed to brand storytelling, with its emphasis on the company’s history. Do you see a difference?

I think they are the same. The Coca-Cola Company is inextricably linked to our brands, and our brands – like the company – have rich histories.

And while we are absolutely committed to telling our brand stories, we’re telling some terrific company stories too.

The Coca-Cola Journey home page is image heavy, with links to stories about the company’s corporate culture in addition to its various brands.

How does Coca-Cola’s online voice differ from the one we’ve been hearing for decades on TV and billboards? One of the buzzwords folks throw around when talking about digital communications is “humanization.”Is that a big part of it?

Every day, Journey is written, laid out, and produced by some pretty terrific humans. I hope our voice and passion is coming through.

Journey seeks to reach a digitally-savvy, globally-aware, and socially-connected reader, and we hope we’re communicating in a way that smart, fun, and even a bit fearless. We haven’t figured everything out yet, but we’re getting closer and better at it every day.

The revamped website includes posts that don’t reference Coca-Cola’s brands.

You’ve said you want Journey to be a “credible source” of information and most of the content on the site refers directly to Coca-Cola brands or partnerships, though you occasionally run general interest pieces. How do you strike a balance between promoting your products and simply providing customers with relevant content?

We are finding the right balance between covering Coca-Cola, which is our job, with providing shared value to our readers, which is also our job. I’m not sure we’ve found the sweet spot yet, but we’re working on it.

We definitely intend to produce more pieces like “Hire Power,” and our goal is to always provide something valuable back to the readers who elect to spend some time with us.

You told the Times that your digital communications and social media team has been re-formed in the last year to look more like an editorial team at a long-lead magazine.” How so?

Coca-Cola Journey aggregates posts from multiple networks into a tumble-style blog for each brand.

We are 100% focused on creating great stories (editorial, art, etc.) and syndicating those stories to the widest possible audience.

We believe that great social media work has great content at its core, and someone has to create that content. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: “there has to be a there there.”

When Coca-Cola Journey was launched, you wrote on the site that “more than 1.8 billion times a day, every day, people express their love for our brands by purchasing one of our products.” Do you really believe that buying one of your products and expressing love for your brands are the same thing?

Yes, because I don’t believe that many folks buy products from brands they don’t like. Every touch point with the consumer is an opportunity for engagement.

There will always be critics who contend that at the end of the day, Coca-Cola is selling different versions of what Steve Jobs famously called “sugar water” (referring to Pepsi), and that any sort of content marketing is an attempt to, well, sugarcoat the public health implications of that. How would you respond?

They should get in touch with us. If a critic wants to author an opinion piece for us, and be open to a counterpoint from Coca-Cola, we will publish it.

Coca-Cola’s Ashley Callahan will be speaking at the sixth annual Custom Content Conference, which takes place April 9-11 in Chicago. The focus this year will be on results, ROIs and upcoming trends. Sparksheet is an official media partner.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/coca-colas-content-journey-qa-with-ashley-brown/feed/27Way Beyond Austin: Lessons From SXSW 2013http://sparksheet.com/way-beyond-austin-lessons-from-sxsw-2013/
http://sparksheet.com/way-beyond-austin-lessons-from-sxsw-2013/#commentsFri, 15 Mar 2013 18:15:15 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16589SXSW Interactive gets bigger every year, but it’s still the world’s best bellwether of what the future of media, business and technology has in store. Here’s what we took away from this year’s event.

Any comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive ought to begin with the caveat that it is impossible to deliver a comprehensive roundup of South By Southwest Interactive.

With hundreds of sessions, exhibits and networking events (read: parties) happening simultaneously throughout Austin over five days, SXSW Interactive is an entirely unique experience for every one of its 25,000-plus participants.

That said, every year a handful of themes and memes manage to rise above the noise – at least for me. Here are my five key takeaways from this year’s event:

It’s not the platform, but how you use it

In last year’s SXSW roundup I noted how there didn’t seem to be any buzzworthy new app or social media platform to break out at the event the way Twitter famously did in 2007.

This year I hardly even heard anybody talk about Twitter – or Facebook or Instagram for that matter. SXSW 2013 may have been the first SXSW to coincide with a papal conclave, but it seems like the interactive industry has officially become platform agnostic.

Or, as Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti put it in his keynote, “The railroad tracks have been built – now the question is, “What’s worth sharing on them?”

One of the most telling moments occurred after Google senior developer Timothy Jordan demoed the much-hyped Google Glass prototype, revealing how partner brands like Evernote, Path and the New York Times are already designing apps tailored to the wearable, headmounted device.

Jordan passionately argued that “by bringing technology closer, we could get it further away.” The device seemed to work flawlessly and the use cases Jordan presented were compelling, but the SXSW crowd was mostly unimpressed.

During the Q&A, someone brusquely announced that although the device’s hardware is impressive, there doesn’t seem to be a single thing he could do with the device that he can’t already do on his iPhone. The crowd burst into applause.

On one hand, the crowd’s cynicism made me think of comedian Louis C.K.’s famous rant that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” On the other, I was heartened to see that people no longer seem to be blinded by the “bright shiny object” syndrome.

The lesson for me is that it’s not about the platform anymore; it’s about what you can do with it. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the platforms people did talk up this year are utilitarian – workflow apps like Evernote and TeuxDeux (designed by keynoter Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA Swiss Miss) and Nextdoor, a platform for community organizing.

There’s also a growing awareness that our ever-increasing production and consumption of digital content has (geo)physical implications. At least that’s the message David Bellona, a designer at Twitter, is hoping to get across.

Bellona gave a talk on “The Paradox of the Cloud,” noting that our ever-increasing online activity is powered by gigantic data centers, which he calls the “factories of the Information Age.” There’s estimated to be as many as 500,000 of them around the world.

Some tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook and Google, are making efforts to source renewable energy to power their operations, but most data centers are run on fossil fuels.

Chalk it up as yet another reason why, when it comes to content, we should be aiming for quality instead of quantity.

The next generation of media brands has taken over

For the first time in three years at SXSW I didn’t come across any panels about paywalls, newspapers or “how to save journalism.” In fact, many of the usual new media pundits and legacy media apologists were conspicuously absent. No one talked about print being dead or alive.

Instead, two of the major keynotes were delivered by web-native content publishers who have figured out how to create massively popular – not to mention free – content and get paid for it: Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti and The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman.

Buzzfeed makes money by lending that recipe to brands in the form of so-called native advertising, or as Peretti called it, “social content marketing,” which he said accounts for 100 percent of Buzzfeed’s revenue.

For example, check out the “The 20 Coolest Hybrid Animals,” a sponsored post that was completely on-brand for both Buzzfeed and Toyota Prius, the hybrid car it was promoting. Silly as it is, this may just be the future of content marketing.

For The Oatmeal cartoonist Inman, the key to success is authenticity (he only publishes when he is inspired to – again, quality over quantity), crowdfunding and profitable brand extensions like books, t-shirts and other swag that allow him to keep his core content free.

Looking outward, ahead and beyond

There was lots of talk about the future at this year’s SXSW. And not in the ubiquitous “Future of X” kind of way. The actual future when none of us will be around, never mind the startup du jour. (Al Gore even wrote a book called “The Future,” which he was interviewed about on stage).

This may go down as the year SXSW Interactive attendees quit naval-gazing – stopped looking at themselves as the be-all and end-all and started looking outward. Sometimes way out.

One of my favourite sessions featured astronaut Mae Jemison, astronomer Jill Tarter (who Jodie Foster’s character in Contact was based on), and Star Trek actor LeVar Burton discussing the 100 Year Starship project, which boldly seeks to enable interstellar space travel within the next century.

NASA was also in Austin to showcase its next-generation telescope, while SpaceX (and Tesla) CEO Elon Musk discussed private space exploration in a Q&A with former Wired editor Chris Anderson.

The Space contingent represented a profoundly optimistic view of The Future at SXSW, while sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling brought us back down to earth with his apocalyptic closing remarks, reminding us that “these are not boom times” and “just because technology advances doesn’t mean things are getting better.”

I didn’t make it to any of the sessions but the healthcare stream was beefed up considerably this year, indicating that if we’re going to make it to Al Gore’s future, we better start taking care of ourselves – and each other.

Seeing sessions about autism, Alzheimer’s and accessibility on the schedule was a sobering reminder that despite what the dot-com millionaires turned self-help gurus lead us to believe, the sky isn’t the limit for everyone.

Maybe that’s what happens when you bundle an interactive conference with a music festival. Everyone starts to believe they’re Bono saving the world with a mobile app (my colleague calls this delusion “the elevation of purpose”).

So here’s the question: How do we remain optimistic and idealistic and moral (to borrow a term from RJ Owen, who led a great session on “moral design”) without becoming trite and sanctimonious? How do we prevent healthy skepticism from sliding into cynicism?

Perhaps we need the Jill Tarters fearlessly leading us toward a Gene Roddenberry future alongside the Bruce Sterlings crankily calling BS. The fact that both were given a platform in Austin is a sign that as big and noisy as SXSW has become, it still gets it, and is therefore still worth going to.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/way-beyond-austin-lessons-from-sxsw-2013/feed/10Becoming South By Southwest: Q&A with SXSW Interactive Director Hugh Forresthttp://sparksheet.com/becoming-south-by-southwest-qa-with-sxsw-interactive-director-hugh-forrest/
http://sparksheet.com/becoming-south-by-southwest-qa-with-sxsw-interactive-director-hugh-forrest/#commentsFri, 08 Mar 2013 17:09:28 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16496Launched in 1994 as an offshoot of the South by Southwest musical festival, SXSW Interactive is now the mother of all digital conferences. Before heading to Austin for this year’s event, we spoke to SXSW Director Hugh Forrest about how that happened.

]]>SXSW Interactive is heading into its 20th year. How did the world’s biggest digital media conference evolve out of a small-town music festival?

We started in 1994 and as context, music started in 1987. In 1994, the title of the event was Multimedia and it was actually part of the film festival.

Then in year two, 1995, we split that off into two events, SXSW film and SXSW multimedia. And then eventually the name transformed from multimedia to interactive in the late 90s.

Interactive was traditionally the smallest portion of the event and would not have survived some very lean years if not for music supporting us and paying the bills.

We started to notice some strong growth in 2003 and 2004. If you’re looking for a tipping point, it was probably 2007, which was when Twitter essentially launched here. That was a big milestone in terms of our overall growth.

Do you see that success story as the reason why startups keep coming back? As in, it gives them the hope that they may be the next Twitter?

That’s a tough question. We’re all looking for easy, understandable marketing bites and hooks, and that’s a pretty nice hook to rely on. The event was fortunate enough to be growing even without the Twitter launch. The growth probably wouldn’t have been as sharp as it has been in recent years, though.

One of the things that Twitter really helped us with is that it caused a lot more startups and entrepreneurs to be here, and because of that, it got a lot more VCs to come.

That startup stuff is so sexy at this point that it gets a lot of attention.

So how do you account for SXSW’s growth? There are a lot of tech conferences out there that are trying to be what you guys are.

I would love to say the reason why we grew is because we have superior management that knows exactly what we’re doing, period, exclamation point! But that is probably not true. We have made every mistake at least five or 10 or 15 times.

Ultimately, the secret – if there is a secret to our growth – is that we have this very strong, very passionate, very creative community that comes to the event, and as much as we do all kinds of brochures or websites or emails, they’re the ones whose word of mouth publicity has created so much interest in this event and they’re the reasons why more people want to come.

Do you ever worry that SXSW Interactive is becoming too big or too noisy and about so many different things that the value is going to be drowned out?

Sure, that’s always a concern. But as much as it’s grown, I think we’re still very dedicated to these ideals of creativity and innovation and inspiration, which we were dedicated to 15 years ago.

It may be a little bit harder to find the kind of people you want to meet at the event as it’s grown, but that said, there’s a lot more of those kinds of people.

Beyond that, I think SXSW is in many ways very much a reflection of Austin. Austin grows a whole lot and one of the things you always see is that people who moved here 10 years ago say, “Yeah, that’s great, but you should have been here ten years ago, it was even better then!”

So there’s that kind of mythology about SXSW, that thing of, “Yeah, it’s fun but it was even better five years ago when you didn’t know about it but I did!”

SXSW generates a huge amount of content over the days of the festival, but its online presence the rest of the year is pretty scant by comparison. Beyond your quarterly print magazine, have you thought of creating a platform for people to engage with the brand throughout the year?

I think that’s one of the areas where we have tremendous room for growth in. We haven’t even scratched our potential.

Certainly the gold standard for the high tech industry is what TED has done with their online content and how much that has expanded their brand. It’s absolutely amazing.

I would love to be able to get our content out in the same kind of way.

We do a lot of audio recording of SXSW sessions and release those as podcasts but, as much as some of us love audio, I just don’t think it has quite the same power as a video. So I think we have lots and lots of room to grow there.

So you see SXSW Interactive becoming not just an event brand, but a year- round media brand?

Yes, I think that’s an ongoing goal, and part of that refers back to the question you asked about the event: Is it getting too big?

As the physical space in Austin becomes more and more limited, if we’re able to showcase more of the content online, either during the event or year-round, then that allows us to get the content from SXSW to more people without them having to physically be here.

The trade show floor at SXSW Interactive 2012. Photo by nickmickolas via Flickr.

Is the new SXSW event taking place this summer in Las Vegas, V2V, a step toward branching outside of Austin?

A little bit. V2V will be a much smaller event to begin with. It has a lot of room to grow. Las Vegas has a lot of room to grow. We picture this as a very small event in year one and hopefully it can grow organically into the much larger event that SXSW has become.

But again, it took us 10 or 15 years to really understand what we were doing on the Interactive side.

I hope it doesn’t take us quite that long with V2V, but I imagine that in a couple years we’ll probably understand we were on the completely wrong model and will be doing something different, as these things pivot.

It always seems like there’s a few big ideas that permeate the event each year. Any expectations for 2013?

One of the strange, interesting memes that has emerged this year in terms of our programming is space. We’ve got 10 or 15 panels on either NASA’s continuing efforts in space or private exploration. Who would have thought that in 2013 space would be hot again?

Another big trend for this year’s event is 3D printing, on its own and as an extension of the ongoing DIY / Craft movement. The 3D printing trend is reflected in the fact that Bre Pettis is doing the opening remarks. And the DIY / Craft movement stuff is reflected in SXSW Create

Predicting what the big trends will be outside of SXSW is always a difficult game. If you think of Twitter, it was a cool thing at the event but I don’t think anyone would have thought that it would change the world. It takes two or three years for anything to make that kind of an impact.

There will be lots of things breaking out that will get buzz, some of which will never get buzz beyond March 15th, others of which won’t get a whole lot of buzz but may end up having a whole lot of long-term impact.

Note: We’ll be tweeting live from SXSW from March 8 to March 12. You can follow us here.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/becoming-south-by-southwest-qa-with-sxsw-interactive-director-hugh-forrest/feed/13Sparksheet at Dx3 Canada This Weekhttp://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-at-dx3-canada-this-week/
http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-at-dx3-canada-this-week/#commentsTue, 05 Mar 2013 18:26:24 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16491Update: Check out our photos from Dx3 2013. We turned people into content! The Sparksheet team is in Toronto this week for Dx3, Canada’s first and only digital marketing, digital advertising and digital retailing trade show. We’re proud to be the event’s official content partner for the second year running. Here’s what we have in […]

The Sparksheet team is in Toronto this week for Dx3, Canada’s first and only digital marketing, digital advertising and digital retailing trade show. We’re proud to be the event’s official content partner for the second year running. Here’s what we have in store:

Sparksheet has a booth on the trade show floor (#201) where we’ll be showing off our content creation chops through live visual storytelling. Let us turn you into content!

Over the past few months we’ve published a series of exclusive Q&As with digital thought leaders (Canadian and otherwise) on the Dx3 Digest. Stay tuned for our very candid interview with Kim Kelleher, former worldwide publisher at Time magazine and current President of Say Media (Dx3’s gold sponsor).

If you’re in the neighbourhood, come say hello. We’d love to meet you. If not, we’ll be doing lots of live-tweeting over the next two days, so stay tuned!

]]>http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-at-dx3-canada-this-week/feed/0Public Media Bullseye: Q&A with Jesse Thornhttp://sparksheet.com/public-media-bullseye-qa-with-jesse-thorn/
http://sparksheet.com/public-media-bullseye-qa-with-jesse-thorn/#commentsMon, 25 Feb 2013 17:37:54 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16401Brand marketers and American public radio used to be strange bedfellows. But brands who overlook the power of podcasts are leaving money on the table, NPR host and podcasting pioneer Jesse Thorn tells us in an exclusive interview.

You currently host three podcasts and produce several others through your Maximum Fun network. It seemed as though podcasts were a big deal in 2004, then people stopped talking about them, and now they’re hot again. How would you characterize the state of podcasts as a medium?

In 2004/2005 when podcasting was new, people were hoping for a hockey stick growth curve and obviously that didn’t take place. The technology wasn’t there to support it in terms of making it very easy and superfunctional for users.

To some extent the technology has gotten easier, to some extent there was an accrual of people who are comfortable with it and to some extent, around 2010 you had more big-name stars entering the field and dragging their fans with them.

Also, a lot more devices are internet-enabled and I think that helps, too.

Do you think brands and marketers should be paying more attention to podcasts?

My experience is that brand-driven podcasts suck and if you’re going to launch a podcast that sucks, it’s not worth doing. The truth is that the skills involved in podcasting are skills that you don’t learn when you’re getting a marketing degree.

Jesse Thorn is the host and creator of the NPR radio show and podcast Bullseye.

The opportunity that I see, frankly, is paid sponsorship of podcasts. I am shocked that I still interact with media buyers who don’t know what a podcast is. I was talking to my friend Jeff Ulrich, who runs the Earwolfnetwork, and he said he’s given up on convincing media buyers to buy podcasts.

The truth is that podcasts, more than any other platform, are intimate and trusted, which makes them a really valuable venue for advertising. I think a lot of people are leaving fruit on the tree in terms of building partnerships with podcasts, more than just radio-style spots. It’s a great opportunity that’s being missed.

A buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days is “brand humanization” and podcasts are one of the most human platforms out there. Maybe they’re too human for most brands?

I have heard from people who say that buyers are partly nervous – especially with comedy – that something is going to happen that is “off brand” over the course of a show.

I think that’s more a CYA situation with the fact that there’s separation between the brand and the buy. But it’s like that with social media, too.

I mean, it’s 2013. It’s not like there’s only 12 hours of television programming that you can advertise on and that’s been made for every person in America.

Can you tell us about Maximum Fun’s business model?

The whole operation is donor-supported, though we have other streams of revenue as well. There are a couple reasons that we did that.

The first is that the advertising market for podcasts still isn’t mature. The second is that I generally prefer non-commercial media to commercial media, and while I’m running a for-profit business, I want to reflect those values.

Ultimately I like having the ability to only use advertisers that I’m very comfortable with.

I like the idea of being in a business where my primary goal is to make something the audience loves rather than simply making something that gathers the most audience. I don’t want any part of making Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

Maximum Fun is Jesse Thorn’s podcast production company. The podcasts are funded almost exclusively by listener donations.

It’s funny, people like to talk about metrics and data, but perhaps the best metric for content is whether people will voluntarily pay for it.

Exactly. My father has worked in non-profits his entire life and he’s still amazed that people will donate to a for-profit operation.

The internet has helped people realize that they can support things they like and that will allow those things to continue. Eighty or ninety percent of our audience don’t donate, but the ones that do give us a really solid revenue base. They are the ones who are most engaged in what we’re doing.

Another buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in social media circles is “community,” but public radio has been powered by communities for decades in the States. Does this make people like you particularly well equipped for the current media landscape?

I think so. I’ve always thought about what I do in terms of community and in terms of building an audience of people who actually care, and less about building the largest audience.

That’s not just public media values, it’s also non-profit values. With anything donor-supported, your goal is to engage your audience in that conversation, because otherwise they won’t give.

You’ve been a big proponent of the so-called New Sincerity movement. I’m wondering what the implications of that are from a commercial perspective, since your show relies on underwriting and sponsorships. At the risk of sounding cynical, what sort of brand is attracted to this particular tribe – and vice versa?

Tonx coffee subscription service is one of Thorn’s few brand sponsors.

I think the brands that are most attracted to what we do are people who make something really cool. There’s this company that’s been a sponsor of ours called Tonx. And they essentially operate a coffee subscription service.

You tell them how much coffee you drink and they send you the world’s best coffee that they pick themselves. This is a four- or five-person company. They roast it themselves, they pack it up and send it out once a week, twice a month.

And for people who care about coffee it’s something that’s really amazing and life-changing because no matter where you live you can get the absolute best coffee and you get to hear the story of it and the whole nine yards.

Another sponsor of ours right now is MailChimp. And the thing about MailChimp is they looked at this world of email lists and said, “God, all of these things suck, what if we did just a really good job of this?”

They’re about making something really wonderful that will actually make people’s lives better and I think those kinds of services fit great with the spirit of what we do.

They love that we’re irreverent, that we’re having fun and all of that and they love that our audience actually cares about things.

In his own words

]]>http://sparksheet.com/public-media-bullseye-qa-with-jesse-thorn/feed/2The Long Tail of Things: Q&A with Chris Andersonhttp://sparksheet.com/the-long-tail-of-things-qa-with-chris-anderson/
http://sparksheet.com/the-long-tail-of-things-qa-with-chris-anderson/#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 22:47:08 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16147Chris Anderson served as editor-in-chief of Wired for 11 years, penning the watershed books The Long Tail and Free, before taking on the role of CEO at 3D Robotics. We spoke to him about his latest book, Makers, and why content and branding are on the front lines of the “new industrial revolution.”

]]>Your book is about manufacturing but you talk a lot about the importance of content and community for successful “maker” companies. Why is that?

I think Kickstarter is a perfect example of this. It’s not just about raising money, it’s also about creating a community around the products. The customers are fundamentally not just passive buyers, they have a part in the design of the product and are cheerleading from the sidelines as the team builds it.

They tend to be evangelists for it and use their own social media channels to promote it. When it comes down to it, they’re the most effective word-of-mouth engines because they felt they were part of something rather than just buying something.

The content, in that sense, [is] the updates. As the creator there’s this implicit contract that once you have pre-sold your product, you’re going to entertain. You’re going to inform your users with a stream of content for the duration of the adventure.

A lot of the maker companies you profile are based on open source technology. You say that the only intellectual property your own company protects is its trademarks. Does that mean branding is going to become more important than ever?

Basically, the old ways of protecting your products were patents, trade secrets,copyrights, trademarks, ownership of distribution channel, sheer purchasing or selling power and things like that.

Those are all less important in this era. Those are the old industrial models of brand protection. The new brands are the ones we know so well from social media – the bottom-up brands.

The brands that are associated less with advertising and more with people’s personal experiences and how they pass their feelings about that experience through social media and beyond.

Maker products follow that same path. To the extent that “brand” represents a distinctive name, style and characteristics that are associated with your company, yourself or your community, it is more important than ever.

Image by Makerbot Industries via wikipedia.org.

1) 3-D Printer: A 3-D printer and the paper printer on your desktop play similar roles. The traditional laser (or inkjet) printer is a 2-D printer: it takes pixels on a screen and turns them into dots of ink or toner on a 2-D medium, usually paper. A 3-D printer takes “geometries” onscreen (3-D objects that are created with the same sorts of tools that Hollywood uses to make CG movies) and turns them into objects that you can pick up and use. Some 3-D printers extrude molten plastic in layers to make these objects, while others use a laser to harden layers of liquid or powder resin so the product emerges from a bath of the raw material. Yet others can make objects out of any material from glass, steel, and bronze to gold, titanium, or even cake frosting. You can print a flute or you can print a meal. You can even print human organs out of living cells, by squirting a fluid with suspended stem cells onto a support matrix, much as your inkjet printer squirts ink onto paper.

You say the maker model works best for “small batch” or niche products, leading a “long tail of things.” Do you think consumer appetites for quality and customization will grow as the technology gets better?

My first book, The Long Tail, was based on what we learned from the era of unlimited choice: the digital media era. What we discovered was that we are a lot more unique than the broadcast marketplace revealed.

Extend that to a parallel movement going on in some of the hipper spots of the world toward things like artisanal food. If you’re into wine, you understood that the more sophisticated your taste gets, the more you deviate from the mainstream.

If you’re into fashion, you know that couture and boutique are in a sense niche and yet they have the most influence.

The presumption is that the maker movement now extends that long tail to physical goods that were previously constrained by the limits of mass production.

But there are limits. There are things we don’t care that much about. I’m very happy to have mainstream milk. When it comes to silverware, I’m happy to go to Ikea.

And then there are other things I care hugely about. For some people it might be clothes, for some people it might be a bike and other people it might be their furnishings. That’s where you decide to live down in the tail.

You decide, “That’s going to be something that defines me. That’s going to be something where I’m really going to exercise my new power of choice.” It’s not the end of the mainstream, it’s the end of the monopoly of the mainstream.

Image via kickstarter.com.

2) CNC Machine: While a 3-D printer uses an “additive” technology to make things (it builds them up layer by layer), a CNC (computer numerical control) router or mill can take the same file and make similar products with a “subtractive” technology, which is a fancy way of saying that it uses a drill bit to cut a product out of a block of plastic, wood, or metal. There are countless other specialty CNC machines: CNC quilters and embroidery machines, CNC sign and vinyl cutters (for silk-screening), and CNC paper and fabric cutters for crafters, to name a few. Some CNC machines are the same size of a large table and are designed to make furniture out of wood. Industrial CNC machines can be as big as a warehouse and can serve out objects as big as an airplane fuselage.

Over the last 15 years we’ve seen both the music and publishing industries disrupted by digital technology. How can current retail and manufacturing brands avoid the same fate as record companies and newspapers? Are there ways they can prepare for the “new industrial revolution”?

I think these brands are fine for a couple reasons. First of all, we’re still talking about physical goods, which could not be distributed as easily as digital products could. So one way or another you’ve got to move atoms around and there are some barriers to entry there.

Twenty years after Amazon was created only a tiny share of retail is e-commerce and the stuff that isn’t goes through traditional distribution channels. The Kickstarters of the world are great, but those products aren’t going to make it to the shelves of Walmart any time soon.

The second reason is that mass production is really good at mass production. What mass production has never been good at is niche production. These are markets of ten thousand, which is a really interesting number.

Ten thousand is too small for a Foxconn, too small for a mass production company, they just don’t operate at that scale. It’s not efficient for them, and it’s too large for the individual or even a little local manufacturing business.

And yet what we learned with long tail digital content was that ten thousand was the sweet spot. That’s where music and film established their appeal.

Ten thousand is enough to build a business on but a few of those ten thousands will be able to catapult into the mainstream to become ten millions.

Image via epiloglaser.com.

3) Laser Cutter: One of the most popular of the new desktop tools is the laser cutter, which is mostly a 2-D device. It uses a powerful laser to cut a precise pattern of any complexity into sheets of whatever material you feed it, from plastics and woods to thin metal. Many CAD programs can break a 3-D object into 2-D parts so they can be fabricated with a laser cutter, and then neatly slotted together like one of those plywood dinosaur kits.

You wrote the book on “free” but conclude in your book that the maker movement is unlikely to go the same route, where people expect their stuff – like their content – to be free. What’s the difference?

They’re physical goods. The expectation with digital goods is that they were free because everyone knew the marginal costs were close to zero. Everyone knows the marginal cost of physical goods is not close to zero.

What’s easy in digital is adoption because barriers to entry are so low. What’s hard is making money. It’s the inverse with physical stuff. What’s hard is physical adoption, what’s easy is making money.

Image via 3d-images.net.

4) 3-D Scanner: This device, which can be as small as a breadbox, allows you to do “reality capture.” Rather than having to draw an object from scratch, you can put an existing object in the scanner. It uses lasers or other light sources and a camera to image the object from all sides, and then turns it into a 3-D image made up of tens or hundreds of thousands of polygons, just like a video-game character or CG movie set. The software can simplify it and let you modify any part you want. A common first experiment is to scan your head, then exaggerate your features and 3-D print a bobble-head of yourself.

One thing you don’t mention in the book is the implications of “the long tail of things” on the environment. On one hand, we may have shorter supply chains. On the other, more stuff. Is that really a good thing?

In general, shorter supply chains are more sustainable. But I think you have to be realistic about shorter supply chains. It’s one thing if you’re assembling locally but all your components are shipped around the world.

Are we just going to get more stuff? Traditionally that’s not been the model. It’s not that we buy more stuff or make more stuff, it’s that we make maybe the same or less but we value it more.

You pay more for it but you use it, you love it, you keep it and you treasure it. You treat it less as a disposable commodity and more as an heirloom or something that defines you.

The four excerpts above are from the book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Copyright 2012 by Chris Anderson. Published by arrangement with Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.

In his own words

Chris Anderson on his transition from editor-in-chief of Wired to CEO of 3D Robotics:

]]>http://sparksheet.com/the-long-tail-of-things-qa-with-chris-anderson/feed/18The Power of Adaptive Content: Q&A with Karen McGranehttp://sparksheet.com/the-power-of-adaptive-content-qa-with-karen-mcgrane/
http://sparksheet.com/the-power-of-adaptive-content-qa-with-karen-mcgrane/#commentsWed, 23 Jan 2013 16:29:35 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=16027Forget responsive design. The key to multiplatform publishing success is “adaptive content,” argues Karen McGrane in her book, Content Strategy for Mobile. We spoke to the author about why she thinks all content is mobile.

It’s funny, I gave one of my colleagues a copy of the book and he read the first page, put down the book, looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve neatly addressed all of my concerns with your book in the first sentence.”

What I’m trying to emphasize in the book is the idea that if you’re thinking you can treat mobile as this separate problem that’s sandboxed off from everything else, you’re making a huge mistake.

The problem is not about writing something different that will appear on a smartphone or tablet, it’s about ensuring that I’m delivering the right content or the best experience to all of my users regardless of what platforms on which they choose to consume content.

Really, this is about having a publishing process that allows you to treat all of the channels and devices that you need to get your messages out, as equal.

In your book you call out the notion of “designing for context,” suggesting that we can’t make assumptions about a user just because she’s using a smaller screen. Do you mean that people don’t consume content differently in certain contexts, or is it just that we don’t have enough information to make those assumptions?

This is probably one of the most hotly debated and contested points in the industry right now. Are we designing for the “mobile context” and what does that mean?

Anybody who’s ever used their phone while they’re sitting on their couch or when they had a laptop available to them recognizes that “mobile” doesn’t always mean that you’re on the move.

I think it’s perfectly appropriate to talk about optimizing for the local case, but don’t spin that to cover all the mobile use cases out there because, frankly, then you’re leaving out all the people who aren’t using their phone while standing on a street corner.

In fact, I would say for most organizations the goal is to achieve a sense of parity between the desktop and mobile.

In cases where you might say to yourself, “I don’t know if this content really needs to be on mobile, I don’t know if it’s worth it,” the answer is that it probably doesn’t need to be on the desktop either.

McGrane’s new book, Content Strategy for Mobile, published by A Book Apart.

You cite NPR as an example of a media brand that has embraced the adaptive content approach. Are any magazines doing it successfully? I assume that it’s harder for a print publication to make the transition than a radio network like NPR, where the raw audio content is already digital.

Right now the legacy process for most publishers is that they think print first. That model is going to break down as you start to realize it’s not just going to be web, it’s going to be mobile web, native apps and tablets, and who knows what’s next?

What if we stopped thinking of this as a sequential process and we start thinking about having one universal structure that would be designed from the start to cover the full range of cases, including print?

Having that flexible package of content that you can work with means that when you get to web or mobile or tablet or whatever, you have more pieces to play with.

Is the biggest obstacle to adaptive content technological – as you say in the book, most content management systems just aren’t equipped for it – or is it cultural, in that legacy media organizations are attached to the way they’ve always done things?

This is a user experience problem. Let’s treat the users, the content authors and the people who are going to use the CMS like they’re users of any other enterprise system.

It’s not an uncommon problem in UX, to say, “Oh right, you’re dealing with two very different sets of users with two very different needs, how do you prioritize their competing needs and design a system that gives you the best shot at meeting all of them?”

I’m really fond of telling publishers that the money they spend on improving their CMS, making it easier for their internal staff to navigate these screens, making it easier for them, for example, to post to social channels, is going to get them way more business value than yet another redesign of their homepage.

You suggest that mobile may be the key to reach under-served audiences and markets. How so?

I have pretty solid data from the U.S. that shows that 31 percent of people who use their mobile phones to use the internet say that’s the only way or mostly the way they access the internet.

This is astonishing! I mean, it’s a third of people who access the internet on their phones.

This has huge implications for all types of industries. If you have any sort of civic responsibility for communicating with the public and you don’t have a content strategy for mobile, you are dramatically underserving a population of people.

I also think it reflects a growing trend of people who do have access to a broadband connection or desktop computer who prefer to get their information through mobile.

There’s a huge underserved population today who are consuming content on their phones and we’re giving them a crappy experience. We’re telling them, “Here’s how the web works for you: You have to pinch and zoom your way through sites that were designed for a much larger monitor, you’re going to get errors and the fonts are going to be really tiny.”

We’ve all kind of collectively thrown up our hands and gone, “Well! That’s good enough!” No, it’s not good enough.

In her own words

]]>http://sparksheet.com/the-power-of-adaptive-content-qa-with-karen-mcgrane/feed/57Help Us Make Sparksheet Betterhttp://sparksheet.com/help-us-make-sparksheet-better/
http://sparksheet.com/help-us-make-sparksheet-better/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2013 23:12:26 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15926It’s a brand new year and we’re gearing up for some big changes around these parts. Over the past three and a half years you’ve seen Sparksheet evolve from an upstart agency blog to an award-winning multiplatform magazine. We’ve taken on more and more topics, industries and platforms, tweaking our site’s design along the way. […]

It’s a brand new year and we’re gearing up for some big changes around these parts.

Over the past three and a half years you’ve seen Sparksheet evolve from an upstart agency blog to an award-winning multiplatform magazine. We’ve taken on more and more topics, industries and platforms, tweaking our site’s design along the way.

We don’t want to fix anything that’s not broken and we’re not about to change things up just because we can, or because we think we’re supposed to.

But we do want to keep evolving and, most importantly, we want to make sure that Sparksheet continues to serve you, our loyal readers, with relevant content in 2013 and beyond.

So before we do anything crazy we’re asking you to fill out a short reader survey. We know that no one likes surveys, but this one is pretty painless, we promise.

Basically, we’d like to know a little bit more about who you are and why you come to Sparksheet. We want to know what sort of content you’re into, what we’re not covering that you think we should be, and what you’re sick of hearing us go on about. We’d also love to know how you use the “good ideas” you find on Sparksheet – who you share it with, why and how.

It will only take a few minutes of your time. And we’d really appreciate it.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/help-us-make-sparksheet-better/feed/0Happy Holidays from Sparksheethttp://sparksheet.com/happy-holidays-from-sparksheet-4/
http://sparksheet.com/happy-holidays-from-sparksheet-4/#commentsMon, 24 Dec 2012 13:30:18 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15847That’s a wrap for 2012, the year of data, books, sponsorshops, memes and false idols. It was also the year we launched a podcast, released an emerging markets e-book and won a bunch of cool awards. We’re off to recharge our batteries, soak in some sun (or snow) and celebrate the holiday season with friends […]

We’re off to recharge our batteries, soak in some sun (or snow) and celebrate the holiday season with friends and family. On behalf of the Sparksheet team I just wanted to say thank you to all our readers, contributors and advocates for your engagement over the past year.

We’ve got big plans for 2013, including a big redesign, new content and more platforms. We want to make sure that Sparksheet remains useful and inspiring to you. Let us know if you have any suggestions.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/happy-holidays-from-sparksheet-4/feed/4Infographic: The Year in Content, Media and Marketing 2012http://sparksheet.com/infographic-the-year-in-content-media-and-marketing-2012/
http://sparksheet.com/infographic-the-year-in-content-media-and-marketing-2012/#commentsWed, 05 Dec 2012 01:25:23 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15654As 2012 draws to a close we look back on the year's biggest news events, trends and recurring themes. Mark Zuckerberg, Carly Rae Jepsen and PSY all make an appearance in our year-end infographic.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/infographic-the-year-in-content-media-and-marketing-2012/feed/93Startup Journalism: Q&A with Craig Silvermanhttp://sparksheet.com/startup-journalism-qa-with-craig-silverman/
http://sparksheet.com/startup-journalism-qa-with-craig-silverman/#commentsWed, 28 Nov 2012 15:17:12 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15579As the founder of Poynter’s Regret the Error blog, Craig Silverman is journalism’s de facto accuracy czar. We spoke to him about his new content startup, Spundge, and why journalistic ethics are a business model problem.

]]>Last month marked the eighth anniversary of your Regret the Error blog. When you launched the platform, did you expect or hope it would lead to a book deal, a gig at Poynter and other career opportunities?

That was my general aspiration. In 2004 I was a freelance journalist in Montreal writing pretty much exclusively for Canadian magazines and some newspapers.

I wanted something to build on my own but I also wanted something that could raise my profile and that would hopefully be of value. The idea that it could turn into a book, different columns, doing workshops and a position at Poynter never crossed my mind.

Do you think that accuracy is the biggest threat to journalism today? Some would point to business model problems, but you have chosen to focus on ethical ones.

The broken business model of news is the result of an even larger shift, which is the splitting of audiences and the inability for any media property to gather a massive captive audience.

Today the question is, how do you deal with that? Developing a really trusted and connected relationship with your community is a huge weight to counter that shift. Yes, accuracy comes into it, being accountable for your mistakes comes into it, but the biggest thing is showing a human face.

If you don’t engage in a genuine and human way with your audience, which does mean being accountable and does mean acknowledging the things you get wrong, you can’t build a strong connection. It’s just a fake aura of perfection. And that’s what we had for a very long time, when news organizations could operate that way and get away with it.

Has the web made accuracy more or less of a problem in journalism?

It’s a double-edged sword. The internet is the greatest disseminator of information and bullshit we’ve ever seen, but it’s also the best way to network fact checking.

The new reality is that you have to do a much better job at figuring out what the facts are and spreading them.

By and large, news organizations are not as good at spreading the facts as they should be and the folks who come up with the misinformation and the hoaxes are much better at appealing to things like emotion, values and desires.

Spundge is a web curation tool created by Silverman that allows users to save and share content.

Spundge isn’t the first online newsroom platform for content creators. What specific needs were you looking to fill with this tool?

Everybody needs a system for finding things that are interesting and that relate to what they do for their job, for collecting those things, for sharing them with the relevant people, and for putting that information into action.

The problem is that there’s a different tool for each part of the process and all those tools lock the knowledge away. They’re about keeping it there just for you. So we saw an opportunity to make that knowledge gathering a lot easier and to make it collaborative.

And aside from putting it all together into an integrative workflow, we should be helping people move towards the act of publishing in some way. That means they should be able to keep private what needs to be private but they should be able to easily take that knowledge and get it out there, whether it’s an email newsletter or a blog post.

You’re currently working with news organizations but I know you’re looking to get Spundge into the hands of brands and content marketers as well. Have you seen different needs from those two markets?

What I’ve seen is that they have their own areas of expertise but that they struggle in other areas. Take the example of a brand that’s getting into publishing. Where they often struggle is the aspect of where their content comes from, how to source it, how to decide what’s right and create good quality content, rather than just trying to sell products.

When it comes to newsrooms, they’re very good at gathering and packaging information, but where they’ve often been struggling is that they have all these internal systems that don’t talk to each other.

Journalists by nature tend to be very protective of the information they gather. The idea of being collaborative and of seeing the added value of collaboration is a big thing that journalists need to open up to more.

You’ve been involved with other journalism startups over the years. Do you think journalists can learn something from Silicon Valley?

With the broken business model and with a sea change in what’s going on with audiences, we need people to think of new ways of building news from the ground up.

That’s why you are starting to see entrepreneurialism journalism programs in universities. There’s recognition in the industry that we need people to really think about these challenges and launch new things.

The other piece, frankly, is that this is a once-in-a-century moment in media, and if you have the skills and you have ideas, this is the absolutely right time to try and put those things into action. I can’t think of another time when I’d rather be involved in news and information in some way.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/startup-journalism-qa-with-craig-silverman/feed/12Connecting Authors to Audiences: Q&A with Togather’s Andrew Kesslerhttp://sparksheet.com/connecting-authors-to-audiences-qa-with-togathers-andrew-kessler/
http://sparksheet.com/connecting-authors-to-audiences-qa-with-togathers-andrew-kessler/#commentsMon, 19 Nov 2012 12:07:50 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15465Ever throw a party but forget the invitations? It happens to authors too. We spoke with Togather co-founder Andrew Kessler about his “fansourced” book-tour platform and why live events matter so much for authors anyway.

]]>What is “fansourcing” and what inspired you to build a website devoted to it?

Fansourcing is a way to make author tours a viable means of promotion. There’s this funny disconnect where all these book readers are hanging out online but they’re getting their recommendations in person. Our idea was to build something that lets you bridge that online-offline divide.

When I was an author, I wanted people to know about my book but everyone said, “don’t try and do a tour because it will be a disaster.”

But I’m stubborn and I didn’t listen to them. I did a lot of four-person events. That really takes the wind out of your sails.

So our idea was, what if you could build a mechanism that made sure you only did good events if you always promoted the events just the right amount?

Luckily we didn’t have to invent this idea, we just applied it to a new space. We basically applied the ideas of Groupon and Kickstarter to live events. And that’s what we call fansourcing.

The idea is that the important activity for marketing your book is connecting with communities. If you can do that, you’ll be able to get enough people to go to your events.

And with a mechanism like fansourcing you basically pre-sell that minimum amount and once the 15th book or the 20th ticket is sold, you agree in advance to do the event.

What does your business model look like?

Our approach is, if you’re a non-traditional space then we’ll do the book fulfillment for you and act as the bookstore. If you’re a bookseller then we do revenue share deals.

If you’re an author that wants to sell tickets or get an honorarium for an event, then we take a small cut, like five percent, or if you just want to use us for free doing RVSP, free events, then it’s all free.

Do you fear you’re putting book publicists or agents out of business with this platform?

It’s the job of agents or publicists to empower their authors. There are so many titles and there are so many authors that need help and there aren’t enough resources to help them all.

So why not create a mechanism that lets everyone do their jobs a little more efficiently? I don’t think we’re putting anyone out of business, we’re creating more opportunities because we’re creating more sales and more hits, and that’s good for everyone.

Do you think live events have become more or less important for authors in the digital age?

They are more important because the value of that word-of-mouth connection is so great and it’s harder and harder to get.

I guess we all sort of thought the value of a like or a share or a retweet would be enough to get people to buy a book. But that didn’t necessarily work out. It takes more for someone to buy a book and it takes more for you to build a book-buying audience.

The real value and importance of live events is that they create stronger connections and better relationships. Identifying those key relationships is the difference between having a successful career as an author or just a title that fades away into obscurity.

It makes perfect sense for an author like Jeff Jarvis to buy into a platform that’s all about crowdsourcing and audience empowerment, but was it a struggle to get other types of writers to buy in?

For us the biggest challenge is this slight shift in behaviour. You need to accept failure at a different point and failure is a tough word. But if you don’t connect with the right audience and you don’t get people interested in a particular event then you should let it go.

This saves you time and lets you spend your efforts developing new audiences and finding other communities.

So you’re basically bringing the lean-startup, “fail fast” model into the event and publishing worlds?

I guess we are! “Fail better every time” is a great approach because it is going to help you identify your audience much more efficiently.

Think about how much nicer an exchange it is for the author and the host to be able to say, “Hey! We gave it the old college try, it didn’t work out” versus flying to Duluth and giving a talk to a giant audience of nobody.

Comprising the Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing.

The Futures of Entertainment conference is one of those all-too-rare events at which almost everybody is out of their element. Launched through MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program by Convergence Culture author Henry Jenkins, the event brings together academics, marketers and media types to discuss the changing relationships between media, brands and audiences.

In a clash of civilizations, academics are forced to explain how their research applies to the real world, while industry folks have to elevate their jargon beyond 140-character sound bites. Last weekend this made for some fascinating, multichannel and at times contentious debate – a rarity at most industry events, where groupthink tends to prevail.

Here are some key takeaways from the event.

Semantics matter (can we move beyond semantics?)

Let’s start with the name of the event itself. The web is so overloaded with prognostications about “the future of” this or that (especially at the end of the year) that it’s refreshing to see the word “future” in its plural form, an acknowledgement that any – and, more likely, every – outcome is possible.

The use of the word “entertainment” over, say, “content” or “media” probably has something to do with the fact that FoE is closely aligned with the University of Southern California (where Jenkins is now based) and that its sister event is called Transmedia Hollywood.

But emphasizing entertainment is also an important reminder for content folks that all media – from journalism, to sports, to film – is ultimately created for an audience and “is only as valuable as the people it touches,” as Frontline’s Andrew Golis put it during a panel on “the futures of public media.”

Members of the panel “From Participatory Culture to Political Participation” discuss how tools like social media are changing politics and activism.

Semantics ­came up over and over again at FoE, especially on the event’s exclusive “backchannel,” which was projected on a screen next to the panelists and on the public backchannel known as Twitter. A conversation about “the ethics and politics of curation” with Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova became a discussion about the difference between curation and aggregation.

A panel made up of three young creators of online video content about issues like economics, marriage equality and Islamophobia was bombarded with questions about why they refused to label their work “activism.” At one point, one apparently fed up audience member posted on the backchannel:

Everybody’s an expert

Speaking of the backchannel, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an event where the level of audience conversation consistently matched and often surpassed that of the “experts” at the front of the room. Maybe this just happened to be a particularly erudite Cambridge crowd, but I think it was more than that. I think that people are starting to question the nature of expertise itself.

This was addressed in a session called “Curing the Shiny New Object Syndrome,” which featured a particularly eclectic mix of academic theory and industry wisdom. At one point, Social Media Examiner’s Jason Falls suggested that one way for brands to avoid wasting time and resources on trendy but ineffective social networks is to rely on a network of influencers, or what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call “trust agents.”

But Eden Medina, an Associate Professor at Indiana University, suggested that the “professionalization” of the expert as a way of “demarcating” a specific career path (which I presume involves some combination of consulting, speaking, book authorship, etc.) has a long and complex history.

Panelists discuss the the “shiny new object syndrome.”

In other words, there’s no guarantee that we can trust professional thought leaders any more than we can trust venture capitalists, whom AT&T AdWorks Lab’s David Polinchock and several backchannel commenters accused of self-servingly perpetuating much of the hype over the web’s doomed “shiny new objects” (Color, ChatRoulette and Augmented Reality apps were a few of the objects mentioned in the discussion).

Instead, Falls and others suggested companies invest in “labs teams” made up of people whose job it is to experiment with and assess new technologies. If I were to put on my expert cap I’d predict that we’re going to see more brands and agencies boasting their own internal incubators and think tanks with various degrees of independence.

During a networking break, I spoke to someone who works at Cambridge-based Microsoft Research (also the home of respected media pundit Danah Boyd) who is studying the arcane art of slapstick video game comedy (!). I suggested he is practicing “branded academia” and he enthusiastically agreed. Is this the a future of entertainment/content? Watch this space.

New media is old

The most heated session of the event ­­– by far – was a conversation with T Bone Burnett, the legendary music producer behind the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and albums by the likes of Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson.

Burnett flew in from Nashville with a clear mission: to convince this crowd of new media elites that the American music industry is under siege and to enlist them in the fight against online piracy.

“Recorded music,” argued Burnett, “is to the U.S. what wine is to France”: America’s greatest cultural ambassador. He called multimillionaire Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who was arrested in New Zealand for copyright infringement earlier this year but who remains a folk hero in some circles, an “organized criminal.”

He told the audience that “it’s stupid for the tech community” – which he perceives as sympathetic to copyright infringers ­– “to attack the arts.”

T Bone Burnett (left) discusses the merits of copyright in the digital age.

Predictably, the FoE audience pushed back against Burnett, accusing him of clinging to an outdated business model and urging him to focus on solutions instead of “whining” about the past, as one questioner put it.

But Burnett’s position was more nuanced than that. He acknowledged that record companies had been “idiots” to pursue individual downloaders with punishing lawsuits. He suggested the industry move away from “copyrights” and toward “transaction rights.”

Burnett said he doesn’t have a problem with individuals sharing music with their peers. His beef is with the likes of Kim Dotcom who are making their fortunes off musicians’ labour while “sucking billions out of our culture.”

I’ve long believed that the music industry bears much of the blame for its decline over the past decade, having failed to anticipate the digital disruption and to adapt its distribution model accordingly.

But I couldn’t help sympathizing with Burnett’s plea on behalf of the musicians and sound engineers who, as he put it, are seeing the door to a music career “closing behind them.”

In one particularly heated exchange with Mauricio Mota, one of the organizers of the conference, Burnett turned the tables on the tech crowd and accused them of living in the past.

The ethics of the internet, Burnett argued, didn’t develop with modern technologies like streaming music, bit torrent and high-speed bandwidth in mind. And though I’m a fan of Mota, I have to say that his equation of high-tech pirates like Kim Dotcom with “fat cat” record label executives did seem a bit dated.

Web pundits like to remind people that “it’s still early days” and, in the grand scheme of things, that’s certainly true. But it’s not that early.

The web was invented seven U.S. presidential terms and 16 Neil Young albums ago. If we’re going to find solutions to problems that, in the end, everyone agrees on (in this case, making sure artists are paid for their art), maybe it’s time to move beyond outdated narratives and caricatures.

If we’re going to build the future(s) of entertainment, we’re going to have to let go of the past.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/where-academia-meets-industry-lessons-from-the-futures-of-entertainment-6/feed/35Inside the Impact Equation: Audio Q&A With Julien Smithhttp://sparksheet.com/inside-the-impact-equation-audio-qa-with-julien-smith/
http://sparksheet.com/inside-the-impact-equation-audio-qa-with-julien-smith/#commentsThu, 08 Nov 2012 16:57:47 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15363Julien Smith wrote The Impact Equation with Chris Brogan, the follow-up to their 2008 bestseller Trust Agents. We spoke to him about creating content that rises above the noise and why techno-utopianism is nothing to flinch at.

You guys emphasize several times in the book that this is not a social media book. It’s almost as though you guys doth protest too much! Why is that?

One reason is about positioning. As authors you can’t just be like, “I’m about social media.” It’s like saying, “I’m about e-mail.” It’s totally stupid.

The other reason is simply to get people thinking beyond social media. We’re stuck in this glut, this place where everyone is thinking, “well, if I can just get more Facebook likes then everything is going to be okay.” But everything is not going to be okay.

The dilemma is that you have to get the readers out of that as soon as you possibly can. And so you make the first sentence of the entire book, “this is not about social media,” and hopefully you get them into another mindset.

I notice that you use the term “platform agnostic” in the book, which is something we hear a lot lately but we’re not always sure what it means. What does platform agnostic mean to you?

To me, it means, use the most effective thing. And it means, don’t be subject to the whims of media or the whims of what anyone else is telling you. The answer to what to use or what platform to work with is: the one that will be most effective.

Although “content” isn’t a variable in The Impact Equation, the whole book seems to rest on the premise that successful people and brands need to be creating lots of great, relevant content, constantly. Do you really think everyone can be a content creator? Content is hard!

Of course content is hard! That’s a totally valid point. I think content should just be taken in a broader sense. The Nike Fuel Band, when you put it on and it gives you updates of how you’re doing, it is a form of content entertainment. It’s a form of content because it’s something you pay attention to.

Almost all media is content in some form or another. So even though you may not be creating content per se, as in blog posts or television, you are creating something that is inherently media-like.

One of the premises behind the book is, everyone is media now because we interact more through media then we do in “real life.”

Almost every interaction we have is through email, through phone, through twitter, etc. And every little while we meet in person and we discover it’s actually different than anything else we do. We’ve become more familiar with being media than being people.

What does impact mean to you? I may be wrong, but I don’t think you ever define it in the book.

It’s because everyone has a different worldview and so it means different things to everyone. At the end of the day, it’s getting the thing that you consider important to be noticed and be done. It could be starting a company and getting investors to your company, but for others it might just be getting an audience.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/inside-the-impact-equation-audio-qa-with-julien-smith/feed/11Good Ideas: Episode 2 – Spirited Away in Chinahttp://sparksheet.com/good-ideas-episode-2-spirited-away-in-china/
http://sparksheet.com/good-ideas-episode-2-spirited-away-in-china/#commentsTue, 06 Nov 2012 19:26:09 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15218In the second episode of Good Ideas: The Sparksheet Podcast, we delve into China's booming luxury wine and spirits industry. Turns out that Chinese luxury is all about status, bootlegging... and green tea with cognac.

]]>In our pilot episode of Good Ideas, we talked about Brand Brazil. This time, we take you into another so-called emerging market that’s in the news a lot these days: the People’s Republic of China.

We hear so much about China’s remarkable “rise” that it’s become almost cliché. But this podcast isn’t about manufacturing or technology or cars. It’s about luxury goods – and more specifically, luxury wines and spirits.

The market for luxury goods in China – everything from handbags to sports cars – is experiencing remarkable growth. In 2009, China surpassed the U.S. to become the second largest luxury goods market in the world after Japan.

As for luxury beverage brands, a study released in October 2012 put the luxury wine and spirits industry growth rate at 12 percent, meaning brands have to figure out a way to cater to the demand, while keeping their products exclusive. After all, luxury is all about exclusivity.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/good-ideas-episode-2-spirited-away-in-china/feed/22Designing Obama: Q&A with Scott Thomashttp://sparksheet.com/designing-obama-qa-with-scott-thomas/
http://sparksheet.com/designing-obama-qa-with-scott-thomas/#commentsMon, 29 Oct 2012 15:19:41 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15073Scott Thomas is the founder of Chicago-based design firm Simple.Honest.Work. We spoke to him about his work on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and his bold attempt to design a “universal language.”

You were the design director of the 2008 Obama campaign. How much of a role do you think design played in building Brand Obama?

I think design plays a pretty important role in building any brand, but I think that brand was much more than just design.

It’s much easier to build a very exciting and powerful brand if you have a really good product to work with and Obama was appealing to many people, which definitely helped our cause.

And then he had written two books that we could look at as reference, and that really got us started on the design process that I think resonated with his message.

So you started with his story and then built the brand around that?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it wasn’t just his story, and that’s something a lot of people get wrong. When we took on the project, we weren’t just looking at his story, we were looking at our collective story as Americans.

And I think that was a far different take than most campaigns. If you look at today’s campaigns, the Romney/Ryan campaign is not necessarily looking at the American people. This race isn’t about the American people; it’s about these two candidates. That’s far different than what we were doing in 2008.

Was it a challenge to change people’s expectations of what a political campaign is supposed to look like?

We had a little bit of work to do. The only thing we had established at the time was the logo mark. For us it was thinking about, “what is the right American typeface for this candidate?”

We had to change a lot of minds in politics as to what that would be, what that would look like. I think they’re very used to things looking a certain way. We were coming from more of an advertising background, so we needed to try and convince them that this could look like a high-end brand rather than a political campaign. So we had to educate.

You were also involved in the Obama administration redesign of whitehouse.gov. It must have been very different designing for a president rather than a candidate, no?

Yeah, very different. I was working for the transition team and we were working toward a deadline of the inauguration.

The guy who came into office eight years prior to Obama’s inauguration didn’t necessarily think of the web as a medium with which to be transparent or discuss the administration’s agenda.

We wanted to be able to blog, we wanted to be able to build a Twitter feed and we wanted to be able to have a Facebook page. But even at that time there was a lot of work to be done on day one in order to make it all possible.

Scott Thomas was involved with the 2008 redesign of whitehouse.gov. Featured here is the revamped site in 2012, which includes links to a blog and social media sites.

The Presidential Papers Act actually had to be amended in order to allow for the President to have a Twitter account or to have a YouTube page.

For the most part, we used very much the same process that we used within the campaign, which meant looking at historical cues to sort of guide what we should be doing.

Typographically, we wanted it to be a little less modern and a little more sophisticated. We wanted to make sure that it put on a nice suit; similar to anybody that enters the West Wing. We wanted to make sure that it was well dressed.

You didn’t work on this year’s campaign, but what are your thoughts on how the identity has evolved now that Obama is the incumbent?

The Obama campaign used Gotham typeface during the 2008 campaign (top). The font for the 2012 campaign remains Gotham but with added serifs.

I suggested they stick with the Obama logo. It has a lot of equity. And I suggested they stop using Gotham as a typeface because it would appear too much like the last campaign and the President is obviously far more experienced now. So going to a slab serif instead of a geometric modern typeface would be a nice image departure.

Overall, they’ve done a really nice job executing the brand and keeping it fresh, making for a very nice relationship between the last campaign and this campaign.

You co-founded the The Noun Project, which has been described as an effort to “create a social language that unites the world.” That’s a lofty ambition! Do you really think design is a universal language?

Yeah, it has been since the beginning of time. Seventeen thousand years ago humans created pictorial representation. We then began having ideographic languages that evolved out of these pictorial forms, which evolved into Slavic languages, which then evolved into our current phonetic form. So I think this is really a nod to the past.

We’re noticing a very similar problem to what we had thousands of years ago: If two cultures are needing to communicate, the way in which they communicate can’t be through some phonetic language, they need to be able to communicate in another way, and the pictorial representation is the best way to do that.

And that’s why when you land in an airport in Europe or in some country in the Middle East or Asia, the symbols and the way-finding devices that get you from point A to point B are the same, even though the words themselves can be incredibly different.

These are the symbols that transcend cultural barriers and I think that it’s important that the language is organized, collected and shared in a new way, using technology to do that.

The Noun Project relies on crowdsourcing, but you have a business model built in. Icons are available for purchase and you even have T-shirts. Do you think we’ve finally come to the point where open source doesn’t necessarily have to mean free anymore?

Yeah, I definitely think so. When we decided to make icons available for purchase it was because users were requesting it in massive numbers.

We wanted to open up the possibility for individuals that were using them for commercial applications to be able to purchase the icons royalty free and we wanted to create a web share with designers that were uploading the symbols to further the incentive of uploading and contributing to the language.

So now we split whatever revenue we make with the designers 50/50. This is a nice little way for designers to earn a certain amount of side income, which I think is a viable model and one we’re continuing to monetize by developing services and applications around The Noun Project as a language.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/designing-obama-qa-with-scott-thomas/feed/11Free Webinar: Keys to Becoming a Brand Journalisthttp://sparksheet.com/free-webinar-keys-to-becoming-a-brand-journalist/
http://sparksheet.com/free-webinar-keys-to-becoming-a-brand-journalist/#commentsSun, 28 Oct 2012 14:59:52 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15132UPDATE: You can now listen to the webinar for free here. Come join us on Thursday, November 1, for a free webinar with me, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy. In conversation with McKay Allen from LogMyCalls.com, I will share some key insights into becoming a “brand journalist” and a few tips for more effective content marketing. Some topics […]

Come join us on Thursday, November 1, for a free webinar with me, Sparksheet editor Dan Levy. In conversation with McKay Allen from LogMyCalls.com, I will share some key insights into becoming a “brand journalist” and a few tips for more effective content marketing. Some topics we’ll cover:

Google says that content marketing is now the key to SEO–why?

Great examples of content marketing – from Spafax to John Deere, Michelin, Lexus, etc.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/free-webinar-keys-to-becoming-a-brand-journalist/feed/44 Gold, 3 Silver Canadian Online Publishing Awards for Sparksheethttp://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-wins-4-gold-3-silver-canadian-online-publishing-awards/
http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-wins-4-gold-3-silver-canadian-online-publishing-awards/#commentsTue, 23 Oct 2012 22:05:31 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=15041Sparksheet is an international publication but most of our team is based in Montreal and it’s always exciting to be recognized in our own country. Last night we won big at the fourth annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards, picking up a total of seven awards in the Blue (business-to-business, professional association, farm, scholarly) division, including: Best […]

]]>Sparksheet is an international publication but most of our team is based in Montreal and it’s always exciting to be recognized in our own country.

Last night we won big at the fourth annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards, picking up a total of seven awards in the Blue (business-to-business, professional association, farm, scholarly) division, including:

Best overall online-only publication (Gold)

Best website design (Gold)

Best e-newsletter (Gold)

Best mobile-optimized website (Gold)

Best blog (Silver)

Best use of social media (Silver)

Best article of series of articles (Silver)

Other big winners this year included the CBC, the National Post, Maclean’s and Huffington Post Canada. A huge thank you to the COPA judges and congratulations to all the other winners.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-wins-4-gold-3-silver-canadian-online-publishing-awards/feed/7Reading Social: Q&A With Goodreads’ Patrick Brownhttp://sparksheet.com/reading-social-qa-with-goodreads-patrick-brown/
http://sparksheet.com/reading-social-qa-with-goodreads-patrick-brown/#commentsThu, 04 Oct 2012 15:14:38 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14823With more than 11 million members talking about 380 million books, Goodreads may just be the world’s largest book club. We spoke with Patrick Brown, the site’s community manager, about what it means to build a social community around a solo experience.

]]>How do you turn reading into a social experience? Isn’t it one of the last truly solitary things we do?

It has always been social to the extent that book clubs have been around for just as long as people have been reading. A book you read that you don’t talk about is kind of half read, in a way. You need that conversation with friends to bring out what you thought about the book or to amplify it or to consider it from a new perspective.

At some level, there’s still a person with a book, and that can’t change much. I do think there are little things that a company like ours can do that make that experience a little bit richer or that just take it in a slightly different direction.

People are coming to Goodreads and posting updates while they are reading the book because of the popularity of our mobile apps. People are on the go, they’re reading, and especially if they’re reading an e-book they can just switch over to the app and quickly say, “I’m 20 percent done,” or, “I love this part.”

It’s not a deep or long conversation at that point. You’re just posting what you think. But your friends might comment on that. They’ll say, “oh yeah, I like that part, too!” or have a little argument or whatever, and then you save the link to your conversation for when you’re done.

What are some surprising things you’ve learned about the way people read and relate to their books?

It’s the incredible breadth of books out there. It’s what people read. I’ve been kind of amazed that there’s a reader for every book in the sense that all of us are kind of parochial in our tastes. We read what we like, and occasionally we might branch out of that if our book club picks a book that’s not usually the sort of thing we would read or if a friend really recommends us something.

But it’s just seeing the sheer volume of books that are out there. So many books that I’ve never even heard of and that aren’t on my radar at all have thousands of reviews on Goodreads. That’s been an eye-opening experience.

How humanly curated is the Goodreads community and how much of it is sorted by computer algorithms?

I think at our heart we’re a social site. Even something like the book-recommendation algorithm, it’s really our community that brings in the data that makes something like that possible. You really couldn’t do this without the scale that we have.

Most people aren’t signing up specifically because they think we can spit 20 great books at them, even though we could do that if they rate enough books. I think they’re joining because their friends are doing it. That’s how this site has grown, it’s all been word of mouth.

We’re pushing something like 16 million books a month to Facebook, which creates more than half a billion impressions, which is kind of crazy. In the end it has all been person-to-person and that’s really been what’s driving it.

So you have a thriving community of readers, but how active are the authors?

Pretty active. We just passed 50,000 authors in our Authors Program, which is small when you consider there are 11.2 million members on the site, but it’s the biggest author community that I know of.

A lot of authors like to use the site like readers do, so they’ll come onto the site to say what they’re reading. If they do have a new book out, they’ll do something like a giveaway. Some of our authors will buy ads from us, some of our authors participate in author chats.

It was pretty amazing. He’s not actually a member of the author program. I just thought his book sounded really interesting. It was a really amazing discussion.

That’s one of the best parts of my job. Seeing comments like, “what an honour to have my question answered by Salman Rushdie,” or something like that. It’s pretty wild for people,

especially if you live somewhere where Salman Rushdie is never going to go on his book tour.

You’re not going to get to shake his hand and thank him for writing his books. So I love being able to put people in contact with their favourite author.

So how does Goodreads make money?

We’re advertising supported, and we do make some money off affiliated sales [Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.]. At this point we work with every major publisher, many smaller publishers and increasingly movie studios – people who are doing a book tie-in to a movie or that sort of thing.

One thing we’ve had a lot of success with is doing a “challenge.” We did this for The Help, for instance. They wanted to do something around the theme of unexpected friendships, so we said, “Let’s create a page where there’s a little challenge and the steps of the challenge are you have to watch the trailer for the movie, you have to add the book to your shelf and you have to write a short thing about an unexpected friendship.”

It was pretty amazing. We got a lot of people to enter that. And it’s just a little sticky thing that people can do with the content from the movie and the content from the book that goes beyond ‘just click and add it to your shelf.’

Do you think the key to Goodreads’ success is that the platform exists independently from where the books are actually sold? Otherwise, couldn’t Amazon just replicate what you’re doing?

I can’t really say whether that’s been the key to our success or not. We’ve never sold books so we don’t know what that would be like.

I know that we are really good at social and that’s what people are coming to the site for. Also, we’re platform agnostic, so whether you’re reading on Kindle, or reading on a Nook or you’re reading a paper book from the library, it doesn’t matter; you can come see what’s going on at Goodreads.

That’s what we’re offering. It gives us a very unique space. We’re not selling books, we’re being the place where people discover books, and we’re finding ways to capitalize on that. That’s where I think the opportunity is in the book business right now. All of this is about discovery in the end.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/reading-social-qa-with-goodreads-patrick-brown/feed/16Five Lessons from Digital Book World – Discoverability and Marketinghttp://sparksheet.com/five-lessons-from-digital-book-world-discoverability-and-marketing/
http://sparksheet.com/five-lessons-from-digital-book-world-discoverability-and-marketing/#commentsThu, 27 Sep 2012 20:01:19 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14738Books are not dead. In fact, people are reading more than ever. That was one lesson of the Digital Book World ­– Discoverability and Marketing conference in New York City this week. Read on for more.

Digital Book World is an online and in-person community that covers the growing e-book industry, but this was their first event all about how these digital books get found by readers. The two-day, singletrack gathering of bookworms generated a handful of important and surprising lessons.

Books are big

Jon Fine

Don’t listen to anyone who says books are dead. Again and again, #DBWDM speakers assured the audience that more people are searching for, buying and reading books than ever. They’re just using different platforms to do it.

Gavin Bishop, head of publishing at Google, presented lots of Google-coloured graphs that showed how book-related Google search queries have grown significantly across all genres since 2009.

The data, which will eventually be released as part of a white paper, demonstrated a direct correlation between book searches and book sales. For example, searches for “Steve Jobs” after the Apple founder’s death predicted the success of “Steve Jobs,” the bestselling biography by Walter Isaacson.

On the retailer side, Jon Fine, director of Author and Publisher Relationships at Amazon, confirmed that sales of both e-books and print books are on the rise. “It’s not about print vs. digital,” he said. “It’s about books vs. everything else.”

In other words, book publishers and vendors are now competing with other forms of content (blogs, video games, social media) as much as they are with each other.

Data is everything

Dan Lubart and Angela Tribelli

Data, data, data. Data was one of the key words at this month’s Content Marketing World conference – and it was king, queen and jester at #DBWDM. As Angela Tribelli, Chief Marketing Officer at HarperCollins put it, “you can’t grow something you can’t measure. “

To underscore the supreme status of data in today’s book publishing industry, Tribelli co-presented with HarperCollins’ recently hired SVP of Sales Analytics, Dan Lubart. But the duo emphasized that data is only meaningful in publishing when numbers people and words people (read: editors) work together.

For example, at her former job with Conde Nast Traveler, Tribelli worked with a data analyst to determine whether Rio de Janeiro really was the “hot new travel destination” that travel writers were gushing about.

Google Trends didn’t support Rio’s case – until Tribelli suggested the data analyst search for alternate spellings of the Brazilian metropolis. Turns out most web searchers aren’t very good spellers, meaning that editors aren’t going to be made redundant any time soon.

Speaking of Google Trends – use it. I can’t tell you how many presenters brought it up as de rigueur for book marketers and publicists. I haven’t crunched the data. But a lot of them talked about the recently revamped Google Trends.

We’ll get back to the data lesson a bit later, but David Goehring, Director of Digital Book Publishing at Wiley, summed it up quite nicely: “What used to be an art – book publishing – has now become a science.”

The author-publisher dynamic is broken

The #DBWDM audience was full of book publishers and every time an author took the podium, they gave them an earful. Erika Napoletano put it most pointedly: “I saw them [her publisher] as partners, they saw me as a dollar sign.”

In a gutsy talk, Joe Pulizzi (the Content Marketing World guy) suggested that publishers are “working with a flawed model.” Instead of marketing books on an ad hoc basis, he suggested publishers should “break down their audiences” and authors by subject and create a publisher-branded “platform” to serve each niche.

Book publishing doesn’t even need to be about (just) books, he said, “it’s about being the leading information provider for your niche” – a feat Pulizzi’s achieved in the world of content marketing.

The good news is that this is starting to happen. Simon & Schuster is trying to “build a community around the love of reading,” said online marketing manager Jessica Chaput, while Penguin has its Book Country platform. It may be only a matter of time until book publishers become strong content brands in their own right.

The author-reader relationship is stronger than ever

Whatever tensions linger between book authors and book publishers may be to the benefit of book readers who have more opportunities to engage with their favourite writers than ever before.

That’s due in part to social reading platforms like Goodreads, which encourages authors to join the conversation (stay tuned for our Q&A with Goodreads’ community manager Patrick Brown) and Togather, which allows authors to “Fansource” their book tours.

Author Elle Lothlorien spoke about responding to negative reader reviews online and winning over her harshest critics through personal and respectful dialogue. Lothlorien said she sees this simply as “good customer service,” emphasizing that “I’m a writer, but I’m a business person too.” If more authors adopted that mentality, publicists might find themselves out of work.

You can (still) judge a book by its cover

Sasha Norkin

Yes, book covers are still very important for discoverability, even for e-books. As Sasha Norkin, VP of Digital Marketing at Barnes & Noble explained, great covers get pinned on Pinterest and shared on Facebook. Plus, highly visual e-books like graphic novels and cookbooks are becoming increasingly popular, according to Norkin.

That said, discoverability is about more than pretty pictures. And here’s where we circle back to the other “D” word. For Amazon’s Jon Fine, “metadata is the new book cover.” That is, e-books need to be properly titled, tagged and categorized for search engines – and ultimately, readers – to find them.

What all this means for digital book publishers is that discoverability and marketing are all about understanding and leveraging the tools, standards and social currency of the web. More people are reading books than ever. That’s the most important lesson of #DBWDM. The rest is just data.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/five-lessons-from-digital-book-world-discoverability-and-marketing/feed/15Beyond Big Data: Q&A with Alistair Crollhttp://sparksheet.com/beyond-big-data-qa-with-alistair-croll/
http://sparksheet.com/beyond-big-data-qa-with-alistair-croll/#commentsWed, 19 Sep 2012 13:50:44 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14656Thought crime and civil rights aren’t usually top of mind when you think of big data – unless you’re Alistair Croll. We spoke with the author, events organizer and start-up veteran about the promise and pitfalls of a data-driven world.

There’s a book by Eric Ries called The Lean Startup. The whole principle of lean is build, measure then learn.

The lean model says identify the thing that’s most uncertain, and then build in experiments just enough to verify or repudiate that uncertainty and then iterate. And the way you do that measuring part is data.

So if you learn to iterate quickly and you collect data and learn from it and build those lessons into the next iteration faster than the competition, you will win.

This is true of any industry, from press to start-ups to big companies, and this data-driven intel is absolutely exploding because of the sheer volume of new sources of data we’ve created.

There are people out there who see this vast amount of data and their eyes glaze over. So how important is the presentation of that data in a form and medium that people can digest and interact with?

It’s absolutely essential. Julie Steele edited a book on visualization and does a great job of explaining the importance of something being accessible.

There’s a company called Narrative Science that will take data and turn it into sentences. They take all the math that’s captured in little league baseball games and basically write newspaper articles that look like they were written by a human. And the uptake is huge because parents want to see an article written about their kid.

When it comes to filtering and analyzing this data, how much of a role will technology and machines have as opposed to, you know, humans?

The human race is very good at coming up with systems to deal with problems. We haven’t got the speed to evolve a bigger brain at the rate that technology is changing so we had to build ourselves a prosthetic brain, and it’s a smartphone.

In a dozen years it will be unthinkable not to have one. When you are born you will have a smartphone that is part of you. It will follow you through your life. You will upgrade it, but it will have all of your contacts, it will have your life, logging stuff like your blood pressure and medications. It will know where you travelled, it will have a history of all your transactions. And none of this is science fiction.

The real moral issue around this is that we use the data to form predictions. And just because you think I’m behaving like a terrorist or a pornographer or a thief doesn’t mean I am. But if you act as if I am, you have effectively persecuted me for thought crime. We don’t need precogs for it, we have predictive analytics.

He said that nobody sees the offer they didn’t get. So if only the white people got an offer for 20 percent off, that’s the same as giving a tax to minorities. But nobody’s aware of the offer they didn’t get because it’s not persecution, it’s just, “I didn’t get that offer.”

The banks used to do this thing called redlining in the 1950s and ‘60s where they would draw a border around a part of the town with all the minorities in it that they didn’t want to lend money to and they would say “no” to loans with those zip codes on them.

Just because we’ve figured out a way to personalize the redlining doesn’t make it any less unfair.

A map of Philadelphia showing redlining; the practice of refusing people from certain districts loans, based on racial stereotyping. Image via Wikipedia.

Now that we’re in futurist territory, what kinds of jobs or roles do you see arising to help navigate these issues?

American scholar Cathy Davidson says that over 60 percent of the jobs our kids will have don’t exist yet.

The first thing is data science. One of the best things I think society could do right now is to stop teaching calculus and start teach statistics. I mean you took calculus and trigonometry in school, but when’s the last time anyone’s used calculus?

When was the last time you used probabilities and statistics? Probably five times on the way here, right? Bayesian math, opinion polls, chances of rain… Yet we spend a very short time thinking about probability and statistics and lots of time learning about calculus.

So in a world where we are dealing with information most of the time, I would say statisticians, data analysts and data architects are very big positions. Also, privacy officers, and machine-assisted curators and programmers. I think the biggest thing is teaching machines how to do stuff.

So does that mean the future is hopeless for us liberal arts and humanities types?

“The reality is that when a machine tells you what you want, a hipster’s going to tell you what you should have instead.” Image via Flickr by Bruno Santos.

No, I think the future is very good for liberal arts and humanities types because when you get far enough up in any field it’s always philosophy. I mean, we just talked about a bunch of different issues, from the rights of the individual to thought crime; these are philosophy issues. These are issues of taste.

And if you look at the most successful e-commerce sites right now, they’re the ones that are curated, they are the ones full of hipsters telling you which fixie bike you need or which ironic moustache T-shirt you should wear.

The reality is that when a machine tells you what you want, a hipster’s going to tell you what you should have instead. There’s naturally going to be this tension between individuality and prediction.

There’s a great book by Edward Tenner called Why Things Bite Back about the unintended consequences of technology. He says, for example, that with computers we expected the paperless office, but in fact what the computer did was turn everyone into their own desktop publisher and we use more paper than ever.

I think the same is true of conferences. We saw the emergence of video conferences, audio conferences, email and all these other remote messaging technologies. What that’s done is reduce the cost of distribution so the traditional media industries like print and publishing are threatened, but it has also reduced the amount of physical interaction we get.

If you are going to go and do networking, increasingly it’s about the lobby conference and the events are becoming more and more structured around that interaction.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/beyond-big-data-qa-with-alistair-croll/feed/47Sparksheet Nominated for Three Folio Magazine Awardshttp://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-nominated-for-three-folio-magazine-awards/
http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-nominated-for-three-folio-magazine-awards/#commentsFri, 14 Sep 2012 16:49:05 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14677We’re thrilled to announce that Sparksheet has been nominated for three Folio Awards this fall. Comprising The Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing. Sparksheet is nominated in the B2B category for: Best Standalone […]

We’re thrilled to announce that Sparksheet has been nominated for three Folio Awards this fall.

Comprising The Eddies, which recognize editorial excellence, and the Ozzies, which honour excellence in magazine design, the Folio Awards are one of the largest international awards programs in magazine publishing. Sparksheet is nominated in the B2B category for:

]]>http://sparksheet.com/sparksheet-nominated-for-three-folio-magazine-awards/feed/4What Does Platform Agnostic Mean?http://sparksheet.com/what-does-platform-agnostic-mean/
http://sparksheet.com/what-does-platform-agnostic-mean/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 12:04:32 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14544We’ve been using the term “platform agnostic” for years. But our recent feature article about the future of magazine apps has given us pause to reflect on an uncomfortable truth: We’re not entirely sure what “platform agnostic” means anymore. Ask a web developer and she will invariably start waxing poetic about hardware architecture, software frameworks […]

]]>We’ve been using the term “platform agnostic” for years. But our recent feature article about the future of magazine apps has given us pause to reflect on an uncomfortable truth: We’re not entirely sure what “platform agnostic” means anymore.

Ask a web developer and she will invariably start waxing poetic about hardware architecture, software frameworks and programming languages. Ask a journalist and he’s likely to start talking about the places content is housed – in print, on the web or in an app.

Speak to a film or television producer, writer or marketer and they might casually drop the term “transmedia,” a close cousin of platform agnosticism which is coming into its own as an industry. Last year we attended a conference in San Francisco all about transmedia.

We like to think of Sparksheet as a platform agnostic magazine. That means we aren’t wedded to any particular medium. We love the web, but we also think there’s a time and place for print, TV and even radio (check out our new podcast).

It also means our content is available on whatever screens or device you want to consume it on, thanks to our website’s responsive design.

Confused yet? So are we.

Which is why we’re asking you to give us your take on the same question:

What does platform agnostic mean to you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

If you’re going to extend a show in any way, you have to figure out what its DNA is, what its essence is as a brand. Then you can carry that over to different platforms and decide if there is anything new to be added to the mix.

Transmedia pioneer and media scholar Henry Jenkins thinks cross-platform content is all about extending the lifespan of a story.

Pieces of the story can be scattered across media platforms and that creates incentives for us to return to that content again and again, creating multiple touchpoints for brands but also creating an expanded canvas for storytellers to work on. The story is not tied to one platform. It is in all media.

Brazilian storyteller and startup founder Mauricio Mota thinks the platform itself can shape how a transmedia story is told.

You are not locked to a little island, you’ve got this big map and people will want to explore it on the Internet, on their cellphone, at an event, or reading a newspaper or magazine… Transmedia allows you to develop different parts of a story, for different audiences, on whatever platform suits it best.

Journalists have always reported, curated, edited and managed information in various ways, no matter what we called it. What has changed over time, as technology gives us more options, is how we display that information to readers, viewers and listeners.

New York Times editor Jonathan Landman boasts about the flexibility that reporting on the web gives to print journalists. For him, multiplatform means the convergence of real-time news on the web with classic print publishing.

Are we a genuine, platform-agnostic 24-hour newsgathering operation or what? Guy climbs building at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning after the paper had closed and the print editors had left the building. Web staff is on the case. We publish the news at 3:11 a.m. We add new information as it becomes available. We mobilize Sewell Chan at 4:30. By 6 a.m. there’s a 1,000-word story with pictures. Good morning, New York.

For content marketer and writer David Preece, being platform agnostic means being adaptive to the constantly shifting winds of mobile and web-based technologies, be they applications or hardware.

By staying platform agnostic, and making sure you do what’s best for your clients and content, you’ll already be one step ahead of those agencies who are fixated on just developing for the latest web platform regardless of suitability.

Same goes for digital and social expert David Patton, who argues that staying platform agnostic lets marketers focus on good content.

Companies looking to sell to consumers or enterprises need to be creating content that can be easily adapted to any platform. Like newsrooms, marketing needs to evolve from being focused on filling a specific platform to creating compelling content that fits in any bucket.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/what-does-platform-agnostic-mean/feed/48Infographic: How Media and Marketing Drive the Olympic Gameshttp://sparksheet.com/infographic-how-media-and-marketing-drive-the-olympic-games/
http://sparksheet.com/infographic-how-media-and-marketing-drive-the-olympic-games/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2012 15:43:20 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14118Since playing to a local crowd in Athens 116 years ago, the Olympics have grown into a multibillion dollar machine broadcast to every corner of the globe. We put together this olympic-sized infographic to show how the Games have evolved alongside the worlds of media, marketing and design.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/infographic-how-media-and-marketing-drive-the-olympic-games/feed/54Presenting Sparksheet’s Free Emerging Markets E-Bookhttp://sparksheet.com/presenting-sparksheets-free-emerging-markets-e-book/
http://sparksheet.com/presenting-sparksheets-free-emerging-markets-e-book/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2012 15:09:32 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=14075For the past few years TNS Austalia’s Carolyn Childs has been writing think pieces for Sparksheet that help marketers unpack the cultural challenges and business opportunities of the world’s emerging markets. Today we’re thrilled to present the culmination of that cross-continental partnership: A brand new Sparksheet e-book! In Same Same But Different: Understanding Emerging Markets, […]

]]>For the past few years TNS Austalia’s Carolyn Childs has been writing think pieces for Sparksheet that help marketers unpack the cultural challenges and business opportunities of the world’s emerging markets.

Today we’re thrilled to present the culmination of that cross-continental partnership: A brand new Sparksheet e-book!

In Same Same But Different: Understanding Emerging Markets, Carolyn offers insights and data about digital trends in Brazil, status anxiety in India, travel habits in China, mobile adoption in Africa, sexual politics in Russia and much more.

Much thanks to Carolyn, Vanessa Hamilton and the rest of the team at TNS Australia’s Travel and Leisure Research division for their ongoing support and collaboration.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/presenting-sparksheets-free-emerging-markets-e-book/feed/7Olympic Flag Carrier: Q&A with British Airwayshttp://sparksheet.com/olympic-flag-carrier-qa-with-british-airways/
http://sparksheet.com/olympic-flag-carrier-qa-with-british-airways/#commentsMon, 30 Jul 2012 14:59:54 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=13955British Airways has been involved with the Olympics Games since 1948 – the last time London hosted the Games. We spoke to Luisa Fernandez, the airline’s global sponsorship manager, about carrying the flag in 2012.

British Airways has been a longstanding partner with the Olympic Games in the U.K.

British Airways’ involvement with the Olympic Games goes back a long time. What does this assocation mean to the brand?

We trace our steps back to 1948 when we were involved as a brand in London, and we’ve also been flying Team GB since 1966, so we’ve had a long involvement with Team GB and ParalympicsGB.

We’re a really proud British brand: We’ve got “British” in our name, we’re red, white and blue and we think this is a fantastic time to celebrate London and everything that’s great about the city.

What criteria do you use when deciding whether a sponsorship is a good fit for the British Airways brand?

We look at marketing strategy and where it’s taking the brand. One of the things we’ll use London 2012 for is to engage with a younger audience. Sponsorship is a fantastic way of talking to new audiences that wouldn’t normally register you as a brand or feel engaged with you.

By tapping into something the whole country is really passionate about, you get a chance to talk to new audiences in a way they wouldn’t really expect you to, and as a result, they become far more engaged in British Airways.

British Airways flew the Olympic Flame on flight 2012 to the U.K. on a plane specially named The Firefly.

How much of a role will social media play in your sponsorship compared to previous years? When BA launched the Olympic-themed “To Fly, To Serve” campaign in February, the ads debuted on Facebook and Google+ – even before airing on TV during Coronation Street!

Social media has been a fundamental part of our strategy over the last five years. We started off with a competition called Great Britons, which is a bursary that still exists, where we asked people to apply to bursaries if they can demonstrate their British talent.

Then we would pay for flights to help them improve that talent. We used Facebook with that campaign. People had to use friends to vote and the ones who got the most votes went on to win flights.

Since then we have involved social media enormously. To launch our Great Britons competition we opened a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch, London for two and a half weeks and people could come down and have a menu tasting.

We only released the tickets on Facebook and sold out in three and a half hours through word of mouth. It was incredible. We then added two more tasting sessions and they sold out in 20 minutes.

We also have a 60-second TV ad that shows all the key areas of central London and by entering your postal code the plane drives by your house. As a result people have been sharing it and it’s gone viral, with 2 million views in two weeks. My dad even told me about it!

As the official airline of London 2012 you will have a significantpresence at the Olympic park. Is it going to be a challenge to replicate the brand’s values and service on the ground as opposed to up in the air?

We have over 300 volunteers who will be helping at the park. For the first time ever, there’s going to be an enormous double-sided screen where people can watch the action, and we’ll have a number of volunteers at the park to make sure people have a fantastic time.

Experiential or on-the-ground events offer a fantastic way of engaging with people who don’t necessarily fly with British Airways – to give them a chance to see who we are as a brand.

You launched an ad campaign recently that focuses on food (“Height Cuisine”) and you’ve also been a sponsor of Taste of London. Is there going to be some sort of foodie tie-in with the Games?

As part of our Great Britons program we found a Michelin-starred chef named Simon Hulstone who has been working with Heston Blumenthal to design a dedicated Olympic-inspired menu on board and which will be served to over 3 million people over the summer. The menu was actually inspired by menus from 1948.

British Airways isn’t just any local brand. As a national airline and flag carrier, you’re also ambassadors for the United Kingdom. How are you planning to welcome the world to London?

We are the flag carriers for Britain. When people set foot in our aircraft they say it’s like being in Britain. We just want to bring a piece of the Olympic Games to all of our flights, so that people’s exciting journey to the Olympic Games starts on the British Airways aircraft.

We have an Olympic-inspired menu, we’ve got a large number of Olympic inspired films and documentaries on board, so there’s a lot that we do to get people excited about the Games before they actually land in London.

The British Airways' Firefly transported the Olympic Flame on its journey across the U.K. Image by markyharky via Flickr.

We’re big believers in the power and intimacy of audio and agree with folks like Mitch Joel and Jay Baer that podcasting is an undervalued and underutilized medium.

Called “Good Ideas” after our trusty tagline, the podcast will allow us to delve deeper into some of the content, media and marketing stories we explore on Sparksheet.

In our first episode, we explore the increasingly relevant phenomenon of country branding (also known as “nation branding” or “place branding”) through the lens of one of the most successful country brands out there: Brand Brazil.

We speak to one of the world’s leading country branding experts and sit down with two marketing profs (a Brazilian and a Canadian who runs a Brazilian exchange program) who help us unpack how Brazil transformed itself in the minds of travellers from “the land of favelas and corruption” to “the land of joy and creativity” in just a few short years.

It turns out that many Brazilians have a more nuanced view of the country’s rising brand than those of us looking in.

]]>You recently launched Clean Break, a six-episode reality series, to promote the Schick Hydro razor on Fuel TV (and online). But you never actually feature the product on the show. Why is that?

When you watch the show in the way it’s being presented there’s little doubt it’s being brought to you by Schick Hydro, but the branding isn’t interrupting your viewing experience.

Every time Clean Break cuts to commercial, “Presented by Schick Hydro” appears. With the outros you get a promotional message. Then we put three commercials into the half-hour time slot. So, in that half-hour we get 11 quality brand mentions.

We did a bunch of research and guys told us that if the content was heavily branded, they would be turned off.

That’s how we came to the conclusion that we didn’t need to brand it, didn’t need to put pictures of razors, didn’t need the guys to wake up in the morning and go, “Oh, I can’t wait to shave with my Schick Hydro before I go surfing today!” That would have been stilted and wrong.

The series is about three men in their 20s and 30s who escape to Hawaii and pursue their “dream jobs.” What’s the connection between the content and the Schick brand?

We came up with this concept of “free your skin” as a way of getting around the drudgery of shaving. That’s where the product started.

As we began brainstorming, the idea of making a “clean break” really started to stick. Stuart McLean at Content and Company came up with the concept and we really liked it.

Clean Break has great analogies back to the product as well, because we’re up against a huge competitor [Gillette], which is one of the top 20 brands in the world and so we said, “we want guys to shake up that every day rut and get out and try something new.”

Clean Break features water imagery to connect it to the Schick Hydro brand.

Did you have trouble selling such a subtly branded series to your C-suite?

The hardest one to buy in initially was me. It wasn’t instinctive for me to spend money and then not put my brand all over the content.

But once we did the research and I realized we’d get credit for it, I was able to create a pitch for myself, which I took to my management. They bought it along with me.

In a recent New York Times article you suggest that Schick’s target demographic (men 18 to 34) is “inherently cynical about advertising.” Does that mean we’ll see more brands embracing content marketing?

I absolutely think you will. Yes, they’re cynical, that’s what all our data says, but TV is still a great way to reach a lot of people. People are spending a lot of their free time on mobile devices, but they aren’t spending significantly less time on TV.

TV advertising isn’t going away, but cracking through the clutter, getting men to pay attention, and then getting them to believe in the brand and act on it is getting more challenging.

So in addition to traditional TV ads we need to find other ways to speak to men.

Let’s be honest – razors haven’t changed much in the past 100 years and there’s only so much you can do to differentiate your product (I’m thinking of that Onion article from a few years back that turned out to be very prescient). Do those limitations on the product-design side force marketers to be particularly creative?

JWT of New York teamed up with photographer Jim Fiscus for the Schick Hydro ad campaign.

You’re right that a piece of sharp metal on a stick scraped across your face is what shaving is and has been for a thousand years. It used to be a sharp rock across your face.

With the multiple blades, I think consumers got blade fatigue, but the number one complaint remains: “I still get irritation while shaving.” So what we’ve been able to create with skin guards and adding better, longer lasting lubrication is a significantly superior shave than anything else on the market.

So are we better to go with this emotional, brand-building bonding stuff? Yes, but we also go with some hard-hitting digital competitive claims that say, “Schick Hydro is preferred over Gillette ProGlide at a better price.”

What we’re doing is creating a very rational approach for the stats men – the guys who want to know why it’s better. For the guys who want something that gives them a hug and makes them feel better in the morning, there’s Clean Break.

So we have two types of content we run that get to both sides of the guy.

Schick is the most popular razor brand in Japan and Taiwan.

Schick is the top selling razor brand in Japan and Taiwan, even though it’s second to Gillette everywhere else [Editor’s note: the razors are sold under the parent brand – Wilkinson Sword – in the U.K. and some other markets]. Why so big in Japan?

Gillette is about 110 years old. In World War I Gillette gave soldiers in the U.S. military razors when they went off to war. Soldiers used these razors the whole time and when they came back at the end of the war, they were Gillette shavers.

Schick didn’t start until after World War I and by the time World War II rolled around, Gillette got that contract again and sampled U.S. soldiers. So Schick has never been first in the U.S. and hasn’t been able to catch up.

We’re slowing making gains, but it’s taking us forever. Contrast World War II with the Korean War and the 1960s. We went into Japan way earlier than Gillette, and established that Schick was the razor to use.

Men are such creatures of habit, it is very difficult, once they’ve formed that habit, to consider changing it. That behaviour, combined with who got there first, explains why it’s so difficult to change market share.

Brad Harrison will be speaking at Custom Media Day, a Custom Content Council event, on Wednesday, July 18, in New York City.

]]>http://sparksheet.com/the-cutting-edge-of-branded-content-qa-with-schicks-brad-harrison/feed/13The State of Content 2012: Google+ Hangout with Joe Pulizzi and Arjun Basuhttp://sparksheet.com/the-state-of-content-2012-google-hangout-with-joe-pulizzi-and-arjun-basu/
http://sparksheet.com/the-state-of-content-2012-google-hangout-with-joe-pulizzi-and-arjun-basu/#commentsTue, 10 Jul 2012 17:05:09 +0000http://sparksheet.com/?p=13736Last fall the international content marketing industry came together for the first-ever Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland. The event was the brainchild of Joe Pulizzi who runs the Content Marketing Institute, publishes Chief Content Officer magazine and pretty much put the term “content marketing” on the map (though you may remember it as “branded […]

]]>Last fall the international content marketing industry came together for the first-ever Content Marketing World conference in Cleveland. The event was the brainchild of Joe Pulizzi who runs the Content Marketing Institute, publishes Chief Content Officer magazine and pretty much put the term “content marketing” on the map (though you may remember it as “branded content,” “custom content” or “custom publishing”).

Joe wrote a great think piece for Sparksheet before last year’s event in which he argued that the term “content marketing” was approaching a bubble that might pop at any moment. Meanwhile, Spafax Content Director and Sparksheet columnist Arjun Basu wrote in his post-event roundup that the content marketing industry was becoming a web-centric silo and that “there seems to be a kind of bunker mentality seeping into the discourse.”

The second annual Content Marketing World takes place in Columbus this year from September 4 to 6. We thought it was a good time to check in with both Joe and Arjun (who will be speaking at the event) about the State of Content a year later. You can watch that conversation below. It turns out that this may be the year that content marketing goes global:

Editor’s Note: In a recent article about Google+ we explored the usefulness of Hangouts for marketers and media brands. Get the full story here.